


(can't) keep this beating heart at bay

by stradlat



Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Friends With Benefits, M/M, ish, ish x2, mentions of past gtop, one-sided gri, y'all know where this is going
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 18:27:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12216423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stradlat/pseuds/stradlat
Summary: As if Seunghyun’s one to talk. If there was ever an adornment system for holding on too long the way Seungri earned jiu-jitsu belts every time he levelled up a rank, Seunghyun would’ve already been awarded the highest accolade possible years ago, probably would’ve even been inducted as asenseifrom how much experience he has. Jiyong’s got nothing on him; he could definitely teach him a thing or two more about really trying—and failing, shambolically—to move on.





	(can't) keep this beating heart at bay

**Author's Note:**

> this is just a bunch of awkwardly written half-smut mixed in with a whole lot of shallow, boring, cheesy angst, coupled with flubbed timelines and a dire overuse of the word _maknae_ (i can't help it, sue me) and some highly dubious characterizations. in short: just all around terrible lmao, but that's just how life is sometimes, sux

 

 

For all that Seunghyun would like to keep blaming Jiyong, he’s always known deep down who’s really at fault.

“Seunghyun-hyung,” Seungri calls out sweetly, inching closer, but his eyes move farther and farther away, smile abandoned somewhere between Jiyong’s agreement to go out for Italian and then Jiyong’s rescindment two minutes later, slinking deeper into the parking lot to meet his new flavour of the month. Or his old flavour of eight months ago, making a one week comeback now that their schedules have aligned and the location’s less oppressive than the constant surveillance back at home. Who ever really knows with Jiyong and his inability to let things the fuck go.

As if Seunghyun’s one to talk. If there was ever an adornment system for holding on too long the way Seungri earned jiu-jitsu belts every time he levelled up a rank, Seunghyun would’ve already been awarded the highest accolade possible years ago, probably would’ve even been inducted as a  _sensei_  from how much experience he has. Jiyong’s got nothing on him; he could definitely teach him a thing or two more about really trying—and failing, shambolically—to move on.

"Seunghyun-hyung," Seungri repeats, much louder this time, the stress on each syllable of his name— _their_ name, Seunghyun prefers to think, because it's the one thing they can still share—purposeful.

Youngbae hears him. Daesung hears him. The staff hear him. The security guys at the outside gates, an approximate hundred metres away, can probably hear him as well. Jiyong, stood closest to the two of them, fingers tapping against his phone in some frantic rhythm that he'll most likely turn into a chart-topping, PAK winning smash hit later on, doesn't seem to, though. He never does.

"You'll come with me, right, hyung?" Seungri asks, voice bright and annoying and everything Seunghyun would adore if it wasn't so damn  _fake_.

He could say no. He could say no, and then the cycle would end, start up a new, less self-compromising one, and the black belt Seunghyun would don would actually symbolize all the permutations of freedom it's supposed to represent—or possibly be an in vogue fashion statement, whichever—rather than the metaphorical noose that has him strangled in a chokehold every time this happens.

"Just to save you from yourself," is what Seunghyun actually says, weaving their fingers together, because those who can, do. Those who can't, stay comfortable in their misery and mediocrity. However the maxim goes. "God knows what kind of sewage water miraculously turned into wine you'll be picking up this time."

Seungri doesn't balk, nor does he bite. Just smiles at him gratefully, as if he really had just saved him, but also disbelievingly, yet he's too tired to prod at Seunghyun for the truth. Seunghyun smiles indulgently back, knows that with Seungri, as endless as his drivel can be, the silences are always what counts.

"Stay out of trouble, you two," Jiyong pipes up all of a sudden, the corner of his mouth tilted up into a smirk. So maybe he did hear. Seunghyun can feel Seungri straighten up from his slump beside him before he can see, the hope and the slightest bit of attention enough to refuel him into motion. "Next time, we'll double date."

And then Seungri's hitting the brakes again, going stiff with disappointment. He grins farcically, and Seunghyun's own teeth hurt from watching how hard he seems to be digging into his molars.

It's the lasting kind of pain. Seungri keeps his teeth bared in talk and laughter all throughout dinner and his awful jokes and the drive back to their hotel, only wavering when he thinks Seunghyun isn't looking. Tough luck; Seunghyun is always looking.

He kisses Seungri against the wall of his suite when he's had enough, pushes his tongue inside his mouth as far back as he can, until he's certain Seungri won't be able to bite down any longer. When Seungri bites down anyways, Seunghyun breathes into him in relief, draws his head back to the sound of Seungri's impatient whimper, the hard and punishing grip he has around Seunghyun's cock.

It's not just that Seunghyun likes the pain—he and Seungri are the same, that way—but it's also calming; it's when Seungri stops being aggressive that Seunghyun starts worrying, knows those are the days when Seungri's been rendered truly irreparable.

Seunghyun fucks him as slowly as Seungri's own hips will allow, which isn't by much. He hitches up against Seunghyun defiantly, insistently, until he's rolled them around and has Seunghyun pinned down on the bed below with each hand braced upon either of Seunghyun's shoulders, leaves him to stare freely, unbridled, at the way Seungri's face shatters as he rides him, the way the veins on his chest flush in a pattern of sweat and red, like cracks running down fine, imported china. Seunghyun traces over them with the pads of his fingertips, stalling at bifurcations, taking his time to reach the branches along Seungri's cock, wrapping around it one digit at a time until he finally has him whole in his hand, taut but supple as Seungri moans tortuously, sinking down onto his length and thrusting forward into his fist at a turn.

These are the moments that Seunghyun remembers the most; when Seungri looks close to coming, movements erratic, eyes rolling back and closed; bottom lip cherry-bitten, lashes dark and prominent against the golden tint of his skin with the shifted angle of his face, redness budding in petals of teeth marks along his neck where Seunghyun's taken to sucking. Seunghyun can never be sure, but he likes to think that these are the moments when there's only Seunghyun in Seungri's mind and no one else; when Jiyong's all but forgotten and the girl he's fucking on the other side of town isn't competition but the loser by default of this whole scenario, because all she gets is the leftovers of Jiyong's love and a half-written song about her and how she hadn't been enough; when Seungri's eyelids flutter open, just for a brief second, and stares right at Seunghyun as he breathes out, " _Seunghyun_ ," the only time he'll ever say it during sex, and Seunghyun can pretend that the only thing stopping him from getting what he wants is himself, him and his monstrous, mutated hero complex, and that everyone's just waiting for him to finally make his move and put an end to their suffering by saying all the words he should've said right from the very beginning.

But the moment never lasts. Because Seungri comes, Seunghyun finishing along with him, and then Seungri won't let Seunghyun touch him in the after, unreachable as he'd always been. He curls himself into a ball underneath the bed sheets, so close to the edge that he's a bad dream and an air-con gust away from falling off the mattress, and all Seunghyun can do is gaze at the muscles on his back and spend most of the time he's supposed to be sleeping actively refraining from pulling Seungri against his chest, scared that if he clutches on too tightly, he'll be the one to break him, in the end.

No one is blameless. The parts of Seungri that's already been chipped and damaged—that, he can still fault Jiyong on. The fact that Seunghyun still cares, after all these years, still tries so hard to fix him back to his original glory—that one's all on him.

 

 

 

 

The story—the parts they recount, in fabricated detail, on the variety shows they rarely grace these days, at least—goes like this:

They form BIGBANG, a six-member idol group, rather than the hip-hop duo that had been prophesied in the minds of two highly ambitious, anointed young boys. Jiyong isn't pleased. Yang-sajangnim, an entire judiciary body in his own right, makes the executive decision to cut Hyunseung out of the group and keep Seungri. Jiyong's even less pleased—which, having had known Jiyong for as long and as intensely as he's had, Seunghyun acknowledges to be his default reaction to anything resembling the concept of change—but doesn't say anything about it, keeps his lips pressed into a thin, straight line and bows at the lowest angle he'll ever bend throughout his whole career, thanking Yang-sajangnim for the opportunity and swearing into the dulling lacquer of their dorm room flooring that they'll work hard to repay the debts they've accumulated under Yang-sajangnim's benevolent watch. 

Jiyong doesn't say anything about it to Seungri, either. More accurately, he doesn't say anything to Seungri at  _all_ ; throughout the duration of pre-debut preparations, Jiyong is as studious at ignoring Seungri's existence as he is with his dancing and songwriting. Fickle as Jiyong is, though, he tires of that, seamlessly transitions into passing his day-to-day with a crusade of criticisms on how Seungri moves and looks and speaks and breathes, and Seungri just takes it all with a subdued nod and an, "I'll do better, hyung," on the off chances that Jiyong doesn't tell him to shut up before marching away in irritation.

After that comes the omission—the part where Seungri, young and scorned and impetuously in love with Jiyong, stays behind with Seunghyun in the practice rooms under the pretense of helping him get up to standard with their choreography, only to ask Seunghyun twelve minutes in if it'd be okay if Seunghyun fucked him, the wall of full-length mirrors and the way they refracted Seunghyun's stunned expression in twenty-seven directions as their witness.

"Jesus, no," Seunghyun imagines he'd said. The reality, of course, is jarringly different; he'd said, "Okay," as quickly as his glucose-deprived brain could transmit through his speech synapses, because Jiyong and Seungri weren't the only ones exhausted by frustrations they needed to dispel—he was lucky it hadn't been him Jiyong hated, since his footwork actually had been fucking atrocious back then—and because ultimately, he'd understood. He'd been there before himself. Hadn't they all, at one point in time, been in love with Jiyong? Weren't they all kind of still?

So Seunghyun had said yes. And, "Fuck, you're so young," as if it wasn't just three years between them, as if he wasn't about the same age as Seungri when he and Jiyong had started messing around. That meant Jiyong had been even younger than Seungri was then, but Seunghyun had rationalized that away with the semantic that both him and Jiyong had been under the age of majority when they'd been together, so it had to have been legal. Somewhat. If not legal, then at the very least, slightly less immoral.

With Seungri, he had no excuse. Seungri was underaged and nursing his first real heartbreak and trying to quell it the only way he's learned how from all the flagrant porn he's watched. That had to classify as taking advantage, in Seunghyun's case. He knew what Seungri thought he wanted out of it, and he knew what Seungri would actually get: a scratch itched, a six-second reprieve from longing, a whole lot of nothing else.

But Seunghyun had said yes anyway, started Seungri slow and gentle; one set of fingers splayed across his stomach, the other slid past the garter of his too big sweatpants and curled around the base of his cock, Seungri bucking up into his strokes after a few short moments of meek hesitation. Seunghyun remembers the tiny part in his head that still remained conscionable not wanting to do anything but get Seungri off, but it quickly changed its tune as Seungri responded eagerly to his touches, arching his back off of the mirror Seunghyun had pressed him up against and grazing Seunghyun's groin with the twist of his hip forward. Seunghyun had unwittingly responded by stepping closer and closer, until he was practically rutting in sync to the movement of his hand on Seungri's shaft, the pressure low in his gut oscillating between a build and an ebb.

He remembers Seungri craning his head up to look at his face, trying to press his lips against Seunghyun's, but Seunghyun had refused, turned his own head to the side so Seungri'd made contact with the underside of his jaw instead. He wasn't going to kiss him, was Seunghyun's swiftly thought of rule; if he was going to do this, he still needed regulations, still needed to keep some boundaries in tact. No kissing, no talking about work, no mentioning Jiyong, or anyone else in the band, for that matter; no catching feelings for the maknae, regardless if it's the animosity Jiyong's trying to force into endemic contagion, or feelings that were far more dangerous, far more lethal than that.

It hadn't taken long for Seungri to come. Seunghyun had gradually sped up his pace until Seungri was shuddering in his hand, mouth still muffled against Seunghyun's chin when he groans out in release. The thick cotton of Seungri's pants had been stained, the small, wet patch enough to yank Seunghyun out of the moment and his own straining hard-on to panic about going back to the dorms and the rest of the guys seeing Seungri's condition and assuming the worst, the truth.

"Hyung," Seungri had said, fingers suddenly grappling around Seunghyun's waist, and Seunghyun, two-sevenths into an anxiety attack and obvious about it, had a fleeting understanding of some of Jiyong's more valid gripes in regards to Seungri—outside of dancing, the kid really didn't have much of a good sense for proper timing. "Hyung—take your sweater off."

"How can you—we're already running late," Seunghyun had muttered, prying Seungri's hands away from him, but Seungri had just kept on coming back. "They'll be expecting us soon, we don't have time to—"

"I know," Seungri had interrupted, having the audacity to sound irked, as if Seunghyun had been the one being unreasonable. Seunghyun had half a mind to reprimand him for disrespecting his hyung, but Seungri had already shrunk back, realizing his misstep before someone else pointed it out, a conditioned response from Jiyong's menace. He'd averted his eyes and let go of Seunghyun, mumbled, "I wasn't trying to—I can use it to cover up, when we go back."

"Oh," Seunghyun had said, and then promptly shucked his sweater off to hide his embarrassment at his misinterpretation of Seungri's intent.  _No getting stupid over a fucking favour_ , he'd added belatedly into his list of rules, and had handed the garment over to Seungri while desperately trying to avoid eye contact, "Here."

Oversized as Seunghyun liked to wear his clothes back then, it was still kind of unsettling to see Seungri look so ridiculously tiny swallowed up in the swaddle of cloth, but it had gotten the job done; the hem of the sweater reached just an inch above Seungri's knees, and the guys either hadn't noticed or had only thought of it as some kindness Seunghyun had exchanged for the time Seungri spent fulfilling the thankless and mostly void task of guiding Seunghyun through any kind of choreography requiring more than fifteen muscles and a fully functioning system of eye-hand-foot coordination.

All except Jiyong, of course. He'd narrowed his eyes and kissed his teeth and slammed plates down onto their dining table; there had only been four. "What, you think you're cool now just because you're wearing Seunghyun-hyung's clothes?"

Seungri hadn't retaliated, simply ambled over to their kitchen cabinet to grab a plate for himself, careful to keep his steps light and soundless lest Jiyong find an issue with how many of Seungri's toes made contact with the ground.

"It doesn't even fit you," Jiyong had continued sniping, interspersed with the clanging of utensils against cheap porcelain. "You're too lanky. It's ugly."

If Seunghyun hadn't been so nauseous from the hypocrisy, he'd have been impressed with how consistent Jiyong's drive was, even all the way down to his cruelty. As it was, Seunghyun had only looked on as Seungri placed his plate back inside the cabinet, unsullied, and retreated quietly towards his bedroom.

"What a brat," Jiyong had grumbled, dropping into his seat with much fanfare as he'd angrily scooped some rice onto his own plate. "You've got to stop spoiling him, hyung. He's not going to learn anything if you keep on being so nice."

"When have I ever spoiled him?" Seunghyun had answered, feeling deserving of a defense. He barely even talked to Seungri outside of rehearsals, much less could it be constituted as anything but perfunctory interaction. Just because he's guilty of one offense doesn't mean he's guilty of all, and he'd already fucked up enough as it is. "Clothes are just clothes."

Jiyong had eyed him across the table—he had a way of looking at you that made it seem like he'd already sussed out what you're doing before you'd even done it—and it had been the most uncomfortable few seconds of Seunghyun's night, which was saying a lot considering what had just transpired over half an hour ago in the YG training room. "Whatever, just don't make a habit out of it. Who knows what kind of ideas that'll kick-start in his brain."

 _Too late, he's already pitched them_ , Seunghyun had thought passingly, but he'd just shrugged dismissively at Jiyong and sat down beside him to eat in silence, the topic effectively dropped, recalling all the while how small Seungri'd looked in his sweater, how Seungri hadn't eaten since the beginning of practice some odd fourteen hours ago, and how, besides the spastic twitch of muscle owing to his arousal, Seunghyun had felt the telltale churn of hunger underneath his hand when he'd palmed at the soft skin on Seungri's abdomen.

Later, when they'd retired to bed, Seunghyun had crept out of his room and into the commons, cracked their sole window open to light up a cigarette. Their manager always bitched him out in the morning for it, but Seunghyun could take a little terrorizing if it meant that he'd have a short semblance of peace; smoking was the only way he could relax as a teenage boy, the flow of nicotine the only thing potent enough to make his tension and jitters subside with a long exhale, and he had both in spades at the time. Participating in some illicit sexual behaviours with your maknae, apparently, could only raise any kind of neuroses into new heights.

A door had opened behind him, but Seunghyun hadn't bothered to stub his cigarette out or hide it. It was probably Jiyong, anyways, olfactory senses set on max sensitivity when it came to the possibility of sneaking in a sordid smoke. Jiyong never acted like he had it harder than the rest of them, but Seunghyun had never took that as permission to pretend like the expectations weren't greatest with Jiyong as the leader, the group's creative foundation, and YG's longest trainee, all in one. Even if it hadn't been right, Seunghyun could also understand, in some capacity, why Jiyong treated Seungri as horribly as he did. They all had their vices, all had things they turned to to cope.

"Seunghyun-hyung." But it had been Seungri who'd said it, sounding like he was the one going through ten packs a day, the way he always did whenever he'd been crying.

Seunghyun had turned around in surprise, cigarette thrown haphazardly out past the banister, hoping it didn't catch on combustible material or burned a passerby below. Now that would've been a scolding:  _soon-to-be debuted idols shouldn't commit second degree murder, Seunghyun! Learn some responsibility!_  "Why aren't you asleep?"

There was something in Seungri's hands, Seunghyun had realized, when Seungri had reached out and presented it to Seunghyun like a church offering; his sweater, compacted neatly into a standard fold. "I wanted to give this back."

Seunghyun noted that Seungri had changed his pants, when he'd taken the piece of clothing from Seungri's hands. It was all clean, innocent cartoon characters on the pajama fabric, a stark contrast to what had been on him before, and Seunghyun had suddenly felt like he was no better than Jiyong, picking on Seungri because he was the youngest, was what had been easiest. "Thanks."

There was really nothing more to say after that, but Seungri had lingered, rocking on his feet as he and Seunghyun comically looked at anything but each other.

"Hyung—"

"Don't—"

They'd both stopped at the same time, their eyes finally meeting in alarm, and then Seungri's lips had curled up in a sheepish smile, only reaching halfway, but it had been genuine all the same. "Sorry, hyung."

"Don't be." Seungri was always sorry, even if there was nothing to be sorry about. Maybe it was to be expected of him, the stipulations of being the maknae, but if there was anything Seunghyun had always hated for himself, it was being confined to such limiting, demeaning, roles. "You did nothing wrong."

"Ah," Seungri had said acquiescently, but Seunghyun had an inkling that he didn't actually agree. "I'm still sorry, though."

"For what?" Seunghyun had asked, fingers picking at the stitches of his pants, itching for another cigarette.

"For—" Seungri had cut himself off, looked away, and Seunghyun had thought,  _to hell with it_ , and pulled out another stick from his pocket. "For earlier. For asking you to—"

"Okay, I accept," Seunghyun had interjected hurriedly, mortified, and placed the butt of the cigarette between his lips before he could say anything more incriminating than, "Now go to sleep."

Because Seungri also had a knack for not knowing when he was being dismissed, he'd plowed on with his apology, morose, "I was being stupid. And selfish. And I'd understand if you don't want me to help you with our choreography anymore."

Seunghyun had expelled a strident puff of smoke instead of answering, scratched at his eyebrow with the hand holding his cigarette. The only one who'd been selfish was Seunghyun; he'd been the one in the position to say no, to know better, to put a stop to things before they got out of hand, and yet he'd still said yes. He was no longer a bystander, not like how he'd always been when he refused to defend Seungri every time Jiyong had lashed out at him irrationally; he was a collaborator, plain and simple, and he hadn't known which of the two was worse. "I don't."

"Oh," Seungri had said, and if Seunghyun had needed more proof to support what he'd already deduced, it was spelled out across Seungri's face then, the crumple of his features as he'd made an effort to conceal his hurt, just like how he usually did with Jiyong. "Alright. Sorry for always being a bother. I'll try to stop."

"No, I meant—" Seunghyun had sighed, stretching his arm out to beckon Seungri over, the buildup of ashes at the end of his cigarette falling like debris all over the sweater Seungri had returned to him with the action. "Come here."

Seungri had looked at him skeptically, if not a little in fear. Seunghyun fully expected him to scurry away, kind of hoped that he would, but Seungri was a people-pleaser at heart and freely gave away his obeisance if he was certain that it'd earn him their affection.

Meaning he'd walked right up to Seunghyun, crowding into the cramped space between dining table and kitchen counter where Seunghyun had been stationed, and peered up at Seunghyun in resignation, awaiting his punishment.

It had made the stewing in Seunghyun's gut roar to life, scalding fiercer than it had seconds, minutes, hours prior. It was enough; Seunghyun had had  _enough_.

"Just—don't listen to Jiyong," Seunghyun had said, voice holding more passion than he'd have wanted, but it was almost worth it when he saw Seungri's eyes widen, and then blink in rapid succession, bashful. "If he has a problem with you, then fuck him. Come to me instead, alright?"

He hadn't wanted to make it sound so...valiant, or however it is it had sounded like, but he'd meant every word regardless. He'd make sure to be available, from then on. They could— _should_ —probably forego all the stuff in the practice room in the future, but Seunghyun had wanted to be there for Seungri if he'd ever need someone to blunt the force of Jiyong's attacks.

Seungri had his lips parted, dumbfounded, until Seunghyun had closed them with a shove of his knuckles up Seungri's chin. That had seemed to reanimate Seungri enough to have him start chewing on them instead, but Seunghyun had known that it was more to keep himself from grinning than it was from actual fret.

"Thank you, hyung," Seungri had said, eyes as bright, dauntless, as they'd been when he was reciting his  _5 Reasons Why I Should Be in BIGBANG_  in front of Yang-sajangnim and the rest of them; like he was truly incorruptible, like giving up wasn't ever going to be a viable option.

It was admirable. Seunghyun had admired him, and admiration made Seunghyun stupid, made him want to break the rules a little bit. That was how it started with Jiyong—it had been the similarities, first, their shared interests in music and the philosophies their pretentious, pubescent selves had thought to be human coda, and then it was Jiyong's commitment to his dream, and how Seunghyun had wanted it so much for him that he'd ended up wanting it for himself, too. Before he even knew it, Seunghyun was auditioning for a spot in YG and kissing Jiyong underneath the street lamp in front of his house when he'd found out that he got in.

And that's what he'd done then, too, kissed Seungri, open-mouthed, as the neon lights from the row of convenience marts across their dorm building filtered in through the window, colouring Seungri's face with shades of red and blue. Seunghyun had one hand bracketed around Seungri's waist, the other hand carded through the hair on the nape of Seungri's neck, and he'd tugged him flush against his body as he'd worked his tongue past Seungri's lips, trying to get a taste of how it was to be that indefatigable.

But then Seungri's stomach had made a series of grumbling noises, most of them vibrating against Seunghyun, and Seunghyun had snapped back from his stratosphere to remember that Seungri hadn't eaten yet, now running on a seventeen hour fast.

None of it had been about Seunghyun. It was about Seungri, and how he needed to be taken better care of, and Seunghyun was just as good as any to start taking some responsibility.

So he'd detached himself from Seungri's lips, untangled the knot he'd made with his fingers in Seungri's mussed hair, had said, "You're hungry. I'll cook you something," and proceeded to putter around for ingredients as if he had any idea what he was doing.

But Seungri had still sat down on one of the dining chairs, waited patiently for Seunghyun to get the cups of water to cups of rice grains ratio right and find the correct temperature for the stove so that the eggs didn't stick to their rusting skillet, lending no help but brimming with encouragement and praise for the barely edible end product. Seunghyun had watched him devour all three servings of rice and the two eggs that still had the yolk intact, and felt his dimples crease in a smile whenever Seungri had looked up at him in satiety and gratitude.

Seunghyun hadn't gotten the urge to smoke for the rest of the night. It was odd; there'd been no nicotine left in perfusion by the time he and Seungri had gone back to bed, but Seunghyun had still fallen fast asleep feeling impeachably serene.

 

 

 

 

Over a decade later—a fucking  _decade_ , Jesus—Seunghyun wakes up without a morsel of his past equanimity and rises out of bed to grab a smoke.

Seungri's already gone. Seunghyun's used to it, is part of his morning routine by now: smoke, take a shower, get dressed, smoke again; skip breakfast, scroll through his Instagram feed, pretend that he's not thinking about Seungri, think about Seungri anyway, smoke two cigarettes one after the other. Rinse, repeat.

An identity crisis shouldn't last this long. Seunghyun's too old, too far gone, to be helped.

His manager hands him a cup of coffee when he gets down to the lobby. Everyone's already there waiting except Seungri. 

"Late night?" Jiyong drawls when Seunghyun, self-proclaimed king of bad decisions, chooses to sit beside him on the settee. "I told you to stay out of trouble."

"A good gnocchi can make you question even the most binding of promises," Seunghyun answers cryptically with an audible slurp of his coffee, to which Jiyong just rolls his eyes and resumes typing on his phone.

"Alright," Jiyong says, dropping the admonition from his tone. Nowadays Jiyong just plays at being a leader rather than actually acting like one, and Seunghyun's stopped trying to figure out what it really is Jiyong's claimed to protect. "But if we're late for soundcheck, it's you I'll be blaming to the fans."

"I'm here!" Seungri's barking out in no time, barreling into the lobby with his hair still wet and his fashion in tatters, a sleek black turtleneck mismatched with the unkempt rips on his denim shorts. "Sorry, sorry, I forgot to charge my phone last night so my alarm didn't—"

"Spare us," Jiyong says, standing up from his seat, but even that doesn't hold the usual threat it does whenever Seungri does something particularly reckless. He must've had a late night himself, then, judging from the jouncy skip in his step and the easy crook of his smile as he saunters over to sling an arm around Seungri's neck. "Seunghyun-hyung already told us you had a good time, and we all know what that's really code for."

Seungri's eyes flicker momentarily towards Seunghyun, and Seunghyun looks back, can't help it. Thank god for reflective sunglasses, he thinks, and then hides the frown he can feel forming on his lips behind the rim of his cup as he takes another sip. 

"No wonder why he's wearing that," Youngbae snorts from the opposite couch, followed by a snicker as Taehyun-noona immediately rounds on Seungri to squawk about how much harder he always makes her job to be when she already has so many other things to stress about. "I'm sitting here trying to fight off a heat stroke while he's over there asking for it because he doesn't know the meaning of self-restraint."

"All I did was eat carbs and drink overpriced wine," Seungri says, indignant, but Jiyong's back to paying him excessive, doting attention, so Seunghyun knows it's mostly for show. "Seunghyun-hyung, tell them."

It's sickening, the games Seungri plays. Even more sickening is the way Seunghyun lets himself be strung along, but Seunghyun's used to that, too, has long since accepted his role in the grand scheme of things. He almost doesn't even mind it, but Seunghyun's also a bigger liar than Seungri, so.

"True gentlemen never kiss and tell, Seungri-yah," Seunghyun beams, wags his eyebrows suggestively, joins the fray of vultures pecking at Seungri's shirt and draws down on the offending neckpiece.

The bite Seunghyun had left last night is still there, bruising beautifully along Seungri's carotid. Seunghyun runs his thumb down, stroking gently at the approximation. When he puts pressure on it, Seungri finally looks up at him instead of Jiyong, and Seunghyun counts it as a petty victory within the context of a much larger war.

"Nice," Jiyong whistles, poking his way past the hand Seunghyun's curled around Seungri's neck to prod at the reddened flesh himself. "You've outdone yourself. That's the biggest one I've seen yet."

"Finally found someone as freaky as you, eh?" Youngbae says from outside the circle, tiptoes up behind Seunghyun's shoulder to take a peek. "How does anyone even have a mouth big enough for that?"

Seungri opens his own mouth, no doubt to dig himself into a deeper hole than the one he's already in, but Seunghyun instinctively presses harder until Seungri's wincing and reaching a hand up to bat away at Seunghyun's wrist.

"Seunghyun-hyung," Seungri says, when Seunghyun doesn't let go. It'd be amusing to Seunghyun, how it could count as both a warning to him and an answer to Youngbae's question, but he's too caught up in the look in Seungri's eyes. There's something there—a message, maybe—but Seunghyun doesn't know what, exactly. All he knows is that it's not something he's seen before, and that's—new. He can't be used to what's new, can't tailor it into what his next move should be.

"Does it always have to be like this so early in the day?" Daesung complains facetiously at the back, smiling despite himself, and Seunghyun takes it as his cue to step away.

 _What the fuck just happened_. "Don't be jealous, Daesungie," Seunghyun simpers dramatically, pouncing on him next and rubbing their cheeks together as Daesung attempts to walk past the group unscathed. Good, Seunghyun thinks. Back to familiar, chartered ground. "Hyung can give you one just as big if you ask."

"I'll pass," Daesung laughs, mechanically wriggling out of Seunghyun's hug. Seunghyun really could kiss him, though, just for being as reliable as he always is and giving him an inconspicuous diversion from—from whatever that was back there. "There should be at least one of us trying to keep a clean image around here."

While Youngbae calls bullshit and correctly argues that Daesung has the dirtiest image of them all, Seunghyun looks over to where he'd left Seungri and is startled to see that he's staring right back.

Seunghyun raises an eyebrow. From the way Seungri whips his head back towards Jiyong's fussing hands, it's obvious that he was caught rather than it having been a planned contact. Seunghyun doesn't know what that means, either, but he doesn't bother dwelling. What's the point? Of all the type of games to be played, puzzles have never been Seunghyun's forte, so he'll leave the guesswork for someone else who isn't already losing. 

Someone calls out something from the entrance, but Seunghyun barely hears it, focus set on how Seungri's gums appear as he giggles to Jiyong's touch. Seunghyun might not be the kind of person who dwells, not anymore, but he still retained the tendency to wallow in things that have always ached him the most.

"Seunghyun!" Hongil reproaches, jostling him by the arm. "Come on, the car's been pulled up."

"Okay." Seunghyun breathes. Showtime. The ache can wait, indefinitely; Seunghyun's done it for years. "I'm coming."

 

 

 

 

Seunghyun hadn't really needed to go on some knight-in-shining-armour parade, as it turned out. Jiyong had taken to ignoring Seungri again after that night in the practice rooms, and Seungri had looked happy enough to not have Jiyong breathing down his neck at every partial and non-mistake he made that Seunghyun hadn't found much of a valid reason to challenge the status quo. Plus, a good prank's a good prank, and Seunghyun had found it hilarious how much it fucked with Youngbae whenever Seungri grinned up at Seunghyun like an inside joke and Seunghyun ruffled his hair back.

And it hadn't taken too long after that for Jiyong and Seungri to find common ground with their prime time TV drama addiction, besides. They probably all should've seen it coming—Jiyong was as devoted to his soap operas as Youngbae and Daesung were pious to their church—but Seunghyun had let the regret of not having the foresight to introduce the solution go because it wouldn't have been much use even if he did; Jiyong liked control, liked going at his own pace. Forcing him to befriend Seungri would've only made him dislike him even more, so Seunghyun had just been glad that Jiyong found them a working compromise much sooner than later, before debut came and however many fans they could attract concocted conspiracy theories about how two of their members secretly hated each other and would actually be bang on the money with it.

Well, partially. During their downtime, when no one but Seunghyun had been watching, Seungri still kept on looking at Jiyong as if he'd built YG Entertainment on his own two underfed, thirteen year-old shoulders. Not that it was entirely off the mark, Seunghyun could concede down the line—and Yang-sajangnim, definitely, if Jiyong threatened to leave the company and held a gun to his head, in that order—but still, they were all only human, Jiyong probably more so than everyone else liked to believe. Aside from Youngbae, it was Seunghyun who'd known that about Jiyong the most.

Seunghyun had always wondered what it would feel like, to be looked at like that. To have someone you actually know idolize you so much to the point where they would take as much unhappiness as they could just so that you wouldn't have to. Girls thought he was some kind of genetic lottery ticket winner, sure, but none of them would go to that extent for him. They had their limits, too, and Seunghyun had been ripe with his own fair share of insurmountable flaws. 

There really was no wonder why he and Jiyong clicked so well. Barring a few character technicalities, they had practically been the same person.

Maybe that's why Seungri had approached him, instead of Youngbae or Daesung. If he couldn't have Jiyong, then he'd flock to the closest thing to Jiyong there is. Seunghyun hadn't thought it that disadvantageous, being the replacement, but being twenty and burnt out and horny could really blow some sizable holes on your ability to be circumspect.

Their first time had been exactly three weeks after Jiyong and Seungri started speaking to each other like colleagues sharing living quarters rather than two subjects locked inside a room to complete a social experiment. Seunghyun remembers because Youngbae had kept a countdown on the kitchen calendar to when Jiyong would eventually rediscover his ego and start ostracizing Seungri again. As to why Seunghyun had checked it that day, he doesn't remember. It's not important.

What's important is that Jiyong was starting up on seeing somebody again. Youngbae knew, because it's Youngbae, and because he and Jiyong told each other everything. Jiyong liked Daesung well enough, but not enough to share. Seunghyun hadn't known because Jiyong hadn't told him, because he and Jiyong were in the process of breaking off an arrangement that had never been established in the first place, and because Jiyong probably thought it would spare him the heartbreak, or would make it hurt even more, Seunghyun hadn't been sure. Either way, Seunghyun was mostly already over it, but he'd have paid Jiyong the courtesy of pretending like he was flattered or irate, respectively, if he was to be pushed for a reaction.

That had left only Seungri to tell the details to. Jiyong thrived on gossiping and being gossiped about; ironically, he considered it a natural medium of building trust. Seunghyun guesses it'd been Jiyong's way of letting Seungri in, divulging something so personal, and what could be more personal to Jiyong than falling in love and his layers upon layers of issues with it.

Seunghyun remembers Jiyong excusing himself from dinner. He had nodded at Youngbae, apologized to Daesung for not finishing his food. Then he'd given Seunghyun a mysterious half-smile, patted the back of Seungri's neck, and slipped out of the front doors like some nighttime vigilante on a mission.

"Where's he going?" Seunghyun had asked, a little annoyed. Jiyong had never used to keep secrets from Seunghyun, despite the ongoing evolution in their dynamic, and it'd been one of Seunghyun's greater fears that Jiyong would start just because they'd both found someone else they'd rather fuck.

"Out," Youngbae had answered, chewing carefully at his rice. When Seunghyun had leveled him with an elongated stare, Youngbae had only shrugged and kept quiet, unerringly loyal to Jiyong as the one who'd got him in. Seunghyun couldn't really begrudge him for it, but he'd still scowled at him all throughout dinner until Youngbae had sighed and declared that he was going to start cleaning up their dishes.

Daesung, who had been assigned to do the washing that night, immediately shot up from his seat and followed Youngbae to assure him that he'll be the one completing his chores. Once the two of them had been fully occupied by the exchange, Seungri had decided to say his piece.

"He's going on a date," Seungri had murmured, low, soft, like he hadn't wanted to say it, and Seunghyun had snapped his head around in surprise to see that he certainly looked that way as well. "He told me yesterday. He said she makes him want to write songs about her."

That about sounded like the romantic Jiyong purported himself to be. Seunghyun would have scoffed at Jiyong's fatalism if not for the growing despondence on Seungri's face. "Sounds serious."

If possible, Seungri's posture had wilted down even more. "Yeah. It's all Jiyong-hyung could talk about for the last three days."

It did hurt a little, Seunghyun had to admit, but he'd already built enough defense mechanisms after years of doing Jiyong's patented brand of back-and-forths that it hadn't been devastating. Seungri was a rookie, had barely even passed his entrance exams—if you tell, you care, and if you care, you fail—so Seunghyun had been prepared for Seungri to be crushed.

But Seungri had been on a streak of defying expectations. Joining BIGBANG, getting Jiyong to warm up to him—they all foretold a resilience that wasn't only unbeatable, but also adaptable to whatever situation Seungri had found himself in. Heartbreak was just another stumbling block that he had to overcome; Seunghyun had been there to act as the stepping stone.

And Seunghyun did say that he would take better care of Seungri, so he'd stood in front of Jiyong's and Seungri's room and deliberated over whether or not he should knock or just go back to bed, because it was stupid, anyways, Seungri didn't need him to tell him that that's just the way Jiyong is and he should just accept it before he really got hurt, but Seungri had opened the door and took the choice away from him and had said, "Hyung!" with a strained smile on his tilted up face.

"Are you okay?" Seunghyun had asked instantly, before he'd lost confidence and let the awkwardness that still loomed over them most times overtake.

Seungri's smile shook before it widened. "Why wouldn't I be okay?"

Seunghyun had considered taking the bait, feigning ignorance on a topic he was proficient in, but pretending hadn't seemed like it'd be the most fruitful way of comforting Seungri at the time, so Seunghyun had gone ahead and said, "You'll get over him eventually."

Which, Seunghyun realized belatedly, wasn't quite the right thing to say either, but at least it'd stopped Seungri from looking so plastic. "I don't—"

"I told you to come to me if you had a problem with Jiyong," Seunghyun had said, fitting himself through the open space on Seungri's right side to enter their room. He'd been in there plenty of times before, knew all the places where Jiyong stored crumpled pages of his unfinished songs, but that night it'd been more Seungri's room than Jiyong's and Seunghyun had never felt more of a stranger treading on forbidden space. "You still can. I meant what I said."

Seunghyun had sat on the edge of their bed, picked at the fraying hems of the sheets. Seungri hadn't said anything. He'd just closed the door and turned around and looked at Seunghyun, observing, before hobbling over to the bed to sit down a good three feet away from him.

"I don't bite, you know. Not unless you want me to," Seunghyun had grinned lasciviously, attempting to lighten the mood, but it had only made Seungri inch farther away and Seunghyun had thought it cute. "I'm just kidding."

"Well, don't," Seungri had said, voice squeaky but firm in its obstinacy, and even that had been cute. Everything Seungri did was cute. Seunghyun could see his cheeks reddening under the glow of their night lamp. "If you're gonna say things like that, then you might as well go ahead and do it."

"What?" Seunghyun remembers laughing, just to hide his disquiet, the bloom of his embarrassment. That night in the practice rooms had been the last thing on Seunghyun's mind, going into Seungri's room, but the manner in which Seungri had said that—it almost sounded like the same invitation, just spelled out in different words. "Are you saying you want me to bite you, Seungri-yah?"

"You and Jiyong are the same," Seungri had said, the reticence of before replaced by a raw agitation that Seunghyun had respected, even as an admonishment formed at the back of his throat for omitting the honorific at the end of Jiyong's name. "You say things you don't mean, and then you expect me to just laugh at it like it's just one big joke. Like  _I'm_  just one big joke."

Seunghyun had reeled back, stung. He knew Seungri was mostly projecting, Seunghyun could understand that—that's what he asked for by being there, hadn't he?—but he hadn't expected it to be that far-reaching. "No one thinks you're a joke, Seungri, we—"

"I am to Jiyong," Seungri had said, losing his bite, knuckles clenched onto the bedspread below him. "If I wasn't, then he wouldn't be saying—he'd tell me—"

Up until now, Seunghyun still doesn't know what had made him move back then. It could have been the furrow between Seungri's brows, burrowing deeper and deeper as Seungri tried to hold back from crying; it could have been the shadows under his eyes, forced to prominence by the unflattering wattage of the fluorescent lamp; it could have even been just Seunghyun, fascinated by things that were broken, toys that came delivered in pieces; most likely, it would have been the assembly right after, the satisfaction of getting to say that he'd been the one to put it all together.

Seunghyun had kissed him. He'd leaned over, closed in on the three feet divide, and he'd kissed Seungri like it was right, like it was fair to confuse him when Seunghyun had sworn to be his reprieve from Jiyong, laved his tongue at the seam of Seungri's lips and took his chance to lick him open when Seungri had inhaled in a shallow breath. 

He drew back in increments, dipping back for short kisses to let him adjust, until Seungri was twisting his body and craning his neck and answering Seunghyun with two hands gripped onto the sides of Seunghyun's shirt.

"Hyung," Seungri had whispered into his mouth, faint and unsure and the polar opposite of how he usually is, and Seunghyun may have been wrong in what he'd started but there was nothing more wrong than having Seungri sound like he did right then. "Seunghyun-hyung, I—"

But Seunghyun had cut him off by trailing his lips down Seungri's chin, his jaw, his neck, until he was at the juncture of his shoulder where his muscle cleaved, and Seunghyun had bit down.

Seungri groaned, and it had thrilled Seunghyun to know that it was out of pleasure more than it'd been out of pain. "Hyung—"

"You're not a joke, Seungri-yah," Seunghyun had murmured against his skin, licking at the fresh marks of teeth that he'd just left, "Not to me."

He had felt Seungri's shiver, felt the quickening of his pulse underneath the cover of his lips. It had been so long since the last time Seunghyun had done this, even longer with Jiyong, but he never forgot how to recognize the signs of when someone was close to coming undone.

"I take you seriously," Seunghyun had continued, making his way back up to Seungri's face, kissing at his philtrum, his nose, the underside of his mouth—anything but his lips—until Seungri was opening his eyes and meeting Seunghyun's gaze. "You got that, maknae?  _I_ take you seriously."

And even if Seungri had looked away, Seunghyun knew from the way Seungri had moved his arms from his shirt and clasped his hands at the base of his spine that he finally understood, "Okay."

With his permission, Seunghyun had pushed Seungri flat on the bed, stripping their clothes off in alternate sequence as Seunghyun reached into the bedside table for where he knew Jiyong kept his lube. Seungri had looked apprehensive at the sight of the bottle, but Seunghyun had kissed him and sank his hips down, grinding their cocks together and turning Seungri's hesitance into eager desperation, nodding in frenzy as Seunghyun took him in one hand and slid a slick-coated finger inside him with the other.

"Seunghyun-hyung," Seungri had gasped, eyes large and round and dark, calves tensed around the back of Seunghyun's thighs.

"Does it hurt?" Seunghyun had asked, pulling back just a little to be sure, only to be stopped by Seungri's hand on his wrist and his jerk down on the still visible part of his finger. "Fuck, Seungri—"

"Please," Seungri had moaned, and Seunghyun had thought that no one would ever find reason to carp about Seungri's whining if they could only hear him like that. "I can take it, hyung, just—"

Seunghyun had obeyed, pushed his finger right in, and then another, moving as glacially as time permitted for when Jiyong came back. He'd made sure to soak the contact in, searching keenly for that spot that would make Seungri collapse, finding it with triumph as Seungri had cried out and rolled his hips to where the pressure would be.

"Please," Seungri had said once more, and it was all it took for Seunghyun to withdraw all of his fingers hastily and push the head of his cock in. " _Seunghyun_."

Seunghyun had no readied rebuke for that, had liked the insolence and the carelessness both in Seungri's informality, knowing that it'd been borne out of Seungri's desire and not of his bitterness. If nothing else, Seunghyun had been good at that: razing another's sanity with a drive of his hips, the flick of his wrist, the heat of his mouth along goose-raised flesh and sensitive skin. If nothing else, Seunghyun could at least give Seungri that.

And he did, until Seungri had been trembling and writhing and scraping the skin off of Seunghyun's back, nails digging in and down as Seunghyun's hand had stroked him into orgasm, clenching it around the full length of Seunghyun's cock and milking his own release with a few more rough thrusts.

Seunghyun had had no time nor need to worry about the post-coital pillow talk; as soon as he'd pulled himself out, he could hear Jiyong coming in through the front door, and Seungri had shoved at Seunghyun's chest and scrambled for the sleep clothes Seunghyun had shed, dressing himself with as much speed and dexterity as he shamelessly prided himself on. Seunghyun had followed his lead, moved to restore the order of Jiyong's things, shucked on his shirt and pants and bounded for the door.

Then the guilt had set in, gnawed at him until his limbs had frozen, turned him back against his will to check on Seungri. He should say something, he remembers mulling, but what? Just like Jiyong, he was about to leave him after all that he'd said, after all that Seungri had confessed.

But Jiyong couldn't know; after everything, Jiyong probably still considered Seunghyun his, and Jiyong didn't need to recruit Seungri for it to be true, in his case. Possessiveness was what made Jiyong human, amongst other things, and he'd have no qualms fighting through ranks to keep all the things that he'd thought belonged to him.

So the instinct to flee had won over. For the first time, it'd been Seunghyun murmuring a, "Sorry," before he'd left, but it hadn't mattered anyway; Seungri had already turned to face the wall, convincingly asleep, if not for the stunts and shudders marring the pattern of his breathing.

On his way out, Jiyong had caught him just a couple of steps away from safety. "Did you just come from my room?"

There had been no point in lying to Jiyong, because Jiyong knew a lie brewing before it even cooked. "Yeah."

"Why?" Jiyong had asked, drawing out the opening consonant, before his face had glinted with conflict as he'd finally disclosed, "Hyung. I'm seeing someone now."

Seunghyun had wanted to roll his eyes.  _Not everything's about you_ , he'd wanted to say, but that also would've been a lie; everything always had a way of leading back to Jiyong. Two minutes, two months back—it'd all ultimately been about Jiyong. "I wasn't waiting for you. I was checking in on Seungri."

That was the truth, but Jiyong had narrowed his eyes as if it was the biggest fib he could've said on the night. " _Seungri_? Since when do you check in on him?"

"Since you two became  _friends_ ," Seunghyun had said gleefully, placing heavy emphasis on his last word, because he and Jiyong both knew that that hadn't been what they were, not yet. "It's just part of Youngbae's data collection. We wouldn't want the maknae to break just before debut, right?"

Seunghyun hadn't been purposefully scathing, hadn't thought that he'd sounded like it, but Jiyong had flinched and squared his shoulders, hackles raised. "You think I'm gonna break him? Is that it?"

 _Isn't he already?_   Seunghyun had thought, but he'd just smiled beatifically Jiyong's way and dodged past him to trek back to his room, because if Jiyong had preferred keeping secrets, then Seunghyun could do so, too.

In the morning, Seungri had appeared at breakfast with a bandage on his neck and a flimsy excuse about having had burnt himself trying to maneuver his flat iron to the back of his head. Youngbae had laughed, and Daesung had told him to be careful, but Jiyong had crossed his arms over his chest and glowered mockingly at Seungri.

Seungri didn't see it, because he hadn't looked at Jiyong. He hadn't looked at Seunghyun, either, but Seunghyun hadn't found it worthy of second-guessing until Jiyong had trained his glare at Seunghyun instead, eyes glimmering with the incandescence of discovery and a near imperceptible hint of betrayal.

"He didn't even use the flat iron," Jiyong had hissed at him in the car, anger billowing only when all other passengers had dozed off to catch some sleep. "It was cold when I touched it."

"Maybe because you hadn't turned it on, Jiyongie," Seunghyun had countered in petulance, and Jiyong's nostrils had flared dangerously, before settling back to normal circumference when he'd sank back in his seat.

"Fuck you," Jiyong had spat, eyes squeezing shut in typical fashion of his vexation. "All that bullshit last night about breaking him, when you're the one leaving bruises on his skin."

Seunghyun had suddenly grown furious himself. Jiyong had an eye for things that sold, the sounds of the future, but with everything else, he'd always been so  _blind_. "If you wouldn't—"

But Seunghyun had stopped himself, because it hadn't been his station. He'd be there for Seungri, and was done with Jiyong, but there were still some things that he couldn't get himself involved in if he'd wanted to foray into their mess and be the one to come out of it intact.

"If I wouldn't what?" Jiyong had pressed, teeth gritted as he'd flashed Seunghyun a sneer, "If I wouldn't  _what_ , hyung?"

"Nothing," Seunghyun had answered, leaned his head onto the window pane and closed his eyes, blinding himself the way Jiyong always had, the way Seunghyun wished he wouldn't. "Nothing, Jiyong."

 

 

 

 

"Seunghyun-hyung."

"Hmm?" Seunghyun hits upload on his Instagram, looks up from his phone, satisfied with the picture of Yeonjun he'd just posted. All of a sudden he misses him, savagely, misses Hyeyoun and his mom and his art and his—home. He misses home. "Ye, Daesungie?"

Daesung schools his face, impassive, but then again Daesung's always impassive. "Are you alright?"

"That's so sweet," Seunghyun coos, tugs Daesung by the elbow to prop him right on his lap, and Seunghyun immediately slides into high alert when Daesung doesn't even try to squirm away. "I love the undivided concern, but you really need to stop trying to babysit me. I can't have my eomma dropping me off at military daycare, or else all the other kids will laugh at me."

"Please, if anyone's the mom, it'd be Youngbae," Daesung protests playfully, but he's still not fighting, still not crinkling his eyes into a jolly smile. "Or Seungri. He's always worrying about you lately. I don't know how many times he's told us how disturbing it is to watch you drink so much."

Seunghyun's leg flexes involuntarily, but it's not from Daesung's weight. "That's the first I've heard of it."

"That's because he only says it when you're not around," Daesung says, and he almost sounds exasperated, which would only make sense if he knows something, but Seunghyun's too petrified to ask. "He thinks you'd get mad if you heard it coming from him, or something."

"Or something," Seunghyun deadpans, before he can even think about it. Daesung looks at him curiously, investigation piqued, but Seunghyun whisks it away with a dimpled grin, all the while berating himself internally for having been caught slipping. "Ah, well. When's that kid ever serious, anyways? He's probably just running out of topics to talk about since I'm not there to moderate an actual interesting discussion."

"Probably," Daesung says, noncommittal, unconvinced. Seunghyun's thigh is seriously starting to cramp, along with the critically thinking part of his brain. "But he does care, you know? He hides behind all that evasion, but he wants you to be safe. Happy."

Seunghyun relaxes. Seungri, wanting him  _happy_? Since when? That pretty much confirms it, Daesung doesn't know anything. "I'll be sure to thank him for his concern."

"You should," Daesung says, emphatic in an understated way, closer to casual, but there's a nuance to his facial expression that Seunghyun can't read, rattles at his bones. "You should pay closer attention to him."

If Seunghyun pays him any closer attention, Seungri might just actually spontaneously combust, but Daesung doesn't need to be privy to any of that. "Of course, eomma. Whatever you say, eomma."

"My son," Daesung exclaims proudly, pinching at Seunghyun's cheeks, and Seunghyun only realizes that it's all for the theatrics when someone clears their throat behind them. "Seungri, my dongsaeng!"

"Nice to know I'm loved too, hyung," Seungri smirks, breezes past the tangle of their bodies to pick his phone up from the surface of his vanity table, thumbs already doing some interpretative dance over the glass screen. Managing his ramen shop? Broadening his business capital? Searching his name up on Naver? Texting a new girlfriend, leading her on? Seunghyun can never really be sure these days. "We should bring out just one chair on stage, next time. The fans would love all of that."

"Then they'll have to pay higher for it," Daesung says, hopping off of Seunghyun's lap to walk away, but not before smiling at Seunghyun, genuine, and coaxing him with a temperate, "Don't forget what I said."

Seunghyun nods, more so from trying to dislodge his heart from his throat than actual concession. He can feel Seungri staring at him from the corner of his eye, and he doesn't know what it says about him that it makes his pulse thrum without even having to look.

"What was that all about?" Seungri asks, still typing incessantly on his phone. "What did he say?"

"Just Daesung putting me in my place," Seunghyun replies, finding it weird how nosy Seungri's suddenly gotten. Usually he'd ask, and then abandon his line of questioning when it doesn't concern him, but something in his tone almost seems urgent.

Seungri finally spares him a full glance. "Daesung puts you in your place now?"

Seunghyun's eyes run along the slope of Seungri's jaw. It's jutted; no, it's not, Seunghyun's just imagining things that were never there, as always.

"Not like that," Seunghyun says slyly, and they both know what he means.  _Not like you_. "Don't tell me you're jealous after all this time, maknae."

Seungri snorts, rolls his eyes exaggeratedly. So Seunghyun had been right. He's mostly always right, now more than ever, but it only succeeds in making him sadder than he already is.

"Come on, hyung," Seungri says, pockets his phone, leans back on the vanity with two hands. "You know it's not like that."

Seunghyun knows. Another thing to be right about. "True."

Neither of them say anything for a while, just size each other up in the uncomfortable dearth. Seunghyun fixates on the spot on Seungri's neck where the bruise should be, but it's disappeared, covered up with god knows how many lathers of makeup, skin flawless and evenly toned, as if the time Seunghyun had spent suckling on it had been rendered obsolete. It's a fitting metaphor for how things are, how Seunghyun really is; Jiyong's always told him how much he needed to work on his metaphors when he's penning his raps, so Seunghyun just counts it as good practice. 

It's Seungri who eventually ruptures the silence. "I liked the picture."

"What?" Seunghyun asks, caught off guard by the non-sequitur.

"On Instagram," Seungri's quick to clarify, hand flying back to his pocket as if to take his phone back out and demonstrate it to him. Seunghyun's confused to note that Seungri's slightly abashed. "Yeonjun. He's so cute."

Seunghyun purses his lips, nods steadily. "He is. He's getting so big now," he says, and then, candidly, "I miss him."

Seungri smiles, and it's the first time that day—that  _week_ —that it's been directed at Seunghyun and doesn't feel put on. "He's your family. Of course you do."

"It's not that," Seunghyun starts to explain, but he bites down on his tongue before he can say something that'd chase Seungri and his smile away, like how Seungri isn't his family, not really, and yet Seunghyun misses him all the time, all the same. "Fuck, I don't know. Must be all this thinking I'm doing about enlistment."

Seungri's smile falls off regardless. "Why are you so afraid of enlisting?"

Quite honestly, Seunghyun doesn't know himself, but he can wager a few guesses: being quarantined under actual expectations, with actual consequences if he fucks up; spending twenty-one to twenty-four to thirty-fucking-six months away from the people he loves, the people he's grown accustomed to, the people who's grown accustomed to  _him_  and his oddball humour and personality; fading into obscurity, missing his chances, losing the opportunities unique to that time frame alone to someone who'd always been better than him, someone more qualified than he'll ever be.

Above all else, Seunghyun's afraid of being forgotten. "I don't know. Maybe I'm looking forward to it. There's a fine line between fear and excitement, isn't there?"

All the vulnerability that'd been present on Seungri's face just seconds ago fluidly transforms into chagrin. "Pretty sure that's love and hate, hyung."

"Ah," Seunghyun says, as if he didn't know that it was. He's disappointed, but he'd brought it on himself, so all he can really do is suck it up and play along. "Our Seungri's really become the local literary expert, hasn't he?"

"It's a popular idiom," Seungri says flatly, digging into his jeans to pull out his phone again, and the dismay in Seunghyun's stomach continues to fester. "Everyone knows it. You'd know it too if you stopped being fake intellectual with all that art and smoking and actually picked up a book."

"Going in for the jugular, I see," Seunghyun says, but he's not really offended. Seungri may be fluent in four going on four-hundred and one languages, but if there was anyone in the group to be faking their interest in academic culture, it'd be Seungri, and everyone knows it. "Some of us just aren't properly equipped to handle the complexities of the written word, Seungri-ssi."

"You always think that," Seungri says, and it doesn't quite sound like a joke any longer. "Whenever there's just the slightest bit of a challenge in front of you, you always give up and say you can't handle it. You don't even try."

"Woah," Seunghyun recoils, taken aback. Not that Seungri isn't 110% correct, but where is this suddenly all coming from? "You lost me. I thought we were talking about books and how I don't read enough words per minute, or whatever."

Seungri presses his lips together, keeps them shut, and Seunghyun's actually certain this time that his jaw works itself into a jut. "Nothing. Forget it. We're going on-stage in a few minutes. Be ready."

Seungri storms out of the dressing room, thunderous, childish steps, and Seunghyun breathes out a lengthy exhale, rubs his palms against the leather of his pants. He swears he's paying attention—so much that he's neglected everything else—but even then he still can't decipher what it is that he really wants from Seungri, what it is that Seungri's willing to give in return.

Fuck this. What Seunghyun really _needs_ is a goddamned smoke.

 

 

 

 

Seunghyun hadn't always been in love with Seungri.

There'd been his first girlfriend, and then his second, and then his third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and then there'd been Jiyong, but Seunghyun hadn't ever been sure if it was really love or just some narcissistic infatuation with someone so similar to you that it was like being in a relationship with yourself. Seunghyun's no stranger to messed up sexual fantasies and preferences, but at the time, that had really taken the cake for most disturbing 4 a.m.-thoughts-about-sex that Seunghyun has ever willfully acknowledged.

It'd been gradual, like the drip of water from a faucet that hadn't been completely turned off, the flood building and building until it had overflowed, spilling past the brim of what Seunghyun could handle.

A touch here. A smile there. Seungri's boisterous laugh, all the fucking time. Seunghyun had kind of hated Seungri's laugh until he hadn't, and that surely should've been his first signal that he was about to embark towards a point of no return.

But he'd ignored it, because Seunghyun dealt in  _won't_ s rather than  _could_ s, and the thought of ever falling in love with the maknae was as laughable as the thought of the maknae ever falling out of love with Jiyong, so his subconscious had probably told him go, had probably guaranteed him that it was still safe for him to move forward and not become a wreck in the process. Liar.

The first instance he remembers is during Jiyong's first solo promotions with  _Heartbreaker_ , and Seunghyun's first day-off from filming his drama. Daesung had been away for a Family Outing taping— _away to your mistress_ , Seunghyun had always liked to tease—and Youngbae was cooped up with Teddy in the recording studios at YG, working hard on his own solo album. Seungri should have been gone, too, chasing skirts in the side streets of Gwangju or the broadcast stations of Seoul, but he'd been sitting in front of the TV when Seunghyun had emerged out of his room to try and appease his empty stomach.

"What are you watching?" he'd asked, instead of  _why are you here_ , because Seungri was an aging teenager and his capriciousness had been as formidable as his brazen speech.

"Jiyong-hyung," Seungri had said, and Seunghyun had thought,  _of course_. A lot of things had changed over the years, but Seungri's dedication to Jiyong had stayed exactly the same. "It's his first live show today."

"Move over," Seunghyun had ordered, unheated Pyrex of refrigerated jajangmyeon in his hand, and Seungri had scooched over to free him up some space on the couch, scrunching his nose at Seunghyun's choice of food preparation—or lack thereof—when he'd found it in himself to tear his eyes away from the screen.

"That's gross, hyung."

" _You're_  gross, maknae."

Where the Seungri of three years ago would've huffed himself into a tantrum, the Seungri of then had only laughed softly at Seunghyun and nestled into his side as Seunghyun had sat down on the spot that had just been vacated. "You guys love me for it."

"That's just what Jiyong tells you," Seunghyun had said, not wanting to stoke Seungri's ego more than it already was, but it'd been true for all of them. Somewhere down the line of gritty beginnings and overnight stardom, Seungri had cemented himself as an irreplaceable part of their team, their lives. "I thought you'd learned not to trust anything Jiyong says by now."

Seungri had frowned, and Seunghyun had contemplated at length on whether or not to apologize because he'd known that that'd hit way too close to home; Jiyong and Seungri were the closest they'd ever been, almost inseparable, but Jiyong was still a player and a smoocher at the core of his being. He'd call Seungri pet names, assert that  _maknae is mine!_ to anyone who'd listen, but at the end of the day, he still took solace in the arms of whichever girl he'd fancied himself in love with at the time, still pretended not to notice how Seungri felt and how much it ruined him that he did.

Thankfully, Seunghyun hadn't needed to, because upon the sight of Jiyong's unveiling on stage, Seungri had already recovered. "He's on!"

Jiyong had been magnificent, oozing with charisma, all the words all those critics used to wax poetic about Jiyong's persona. Seunghyun hadn't been in love with Jiyong in years, but even he couldn't tear his eyes away from him when he performed, the smooth cadence of his dance steps juxtaposedly lulling him into a light sleep.

"Hyung!" Seungri had shaken him awake, affronted on Jiyong's behalf. "I can't believe you're sleeping through this! Don't you want to support Jiyong-hyung?"

"I'm tired, Seungri," Seunghyun had whined, swatting Seungri's hand away, refusing to open his eyes to the light. He really had been tired—constantly feeling intimidated on set should be considered a life-threatening pathology, seriously—and watching one of Jiyong's next fifty performances on Inkigayo wasn't really going to make a huge difference on Jiyong's path to success. "Let me rest."

The shaking on his shoulder had stopped. Tranquility. "Hyung?"

Or not. Seunghyun had groaned pitifully. "What?"

Seungri hadn't responded. Seunghyun had arranged himself more comfortably on the couch, thinking that Seungri had finally taken the hint and acted accordingly to it, but then Seungri had spoken up again and the question had almost made Seunghyun catapult to the ground. "Do you want me to suck you off?"

"What the  _fuck_ ," Seunghyun had muttered, draping a forearm over his eyes when he should've really draped it over his cock, the traitorous thing obviously liking the suggestion a little too damn much. 

They had their routine: Seungri pined after Jiyong who pined after someone who's not Seungri, and Seunghyun pined after a good, stress-relieving lay and a non-tumultuous working and living environment and a maknae who didn't pout every time Jiyong so much as looked at a person with breasts, never mind that he'd been mistaken and it hadn't actually been a girl he was ogling at. 

Since neither of them really had the time nor the privacy to experiment, all their trysts had been cookie-cutter quickies, with Seunghyun buried deep between Seungri's legs and Seungri's cock jerking off in Seunghyun's hand, both of them prioritizing getting off rather than the actual methodology of getting to it. Seunghyun had been satisfied with whatever, as long as it'd ticked off all his prerequisites for fucking Seungri, but he couldn't truthfully say that he hadn't thought about asking for something more, something better, during all those nights that Seungri would refuse him for no other reason than relentlessly siccing himself on Jiyong in the hope that he'd finally reciprocate even half of what Seungri felt.

But it was Seungri who'd asked, and somehow that made the idea even better. And Seunghyun had wanted, so bad. He'd never been one to turn away anything gift-wrapped, but being a ranking idol with a fanbase as dedicated as they were deranged had trained him to at least be wary of its contents. "Why?"

Seunghyun could see Seungri bite his lip from under the curve of his arm that couldn't shield his eyes. "You seem stressed," he'd heard Seungri say, steady, but there'd been an inflection there that had betrayed his composure. "It's, uh—you always, you know, help  _me_  out, so I thought I'd just return the favour and—"

"You're serious, then?" Seunghyun had asked, hating the anticipation in his voice but not being able to do anything about it, pulled his arm off of his face to sit up and gauge the severity of Seungri's offer. "You really want to suck me off?"

Seungri had blanched. "It's not that I want to—"

Seunghyun's mouth, on the way to a smile, had instantly flipped switch and carved into a deflated scowl. "I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do."

"Okay, then I want to!" Seungri had cawed, as if Seunghyun had insulted him by having some basic human decency, and cupped Seunghyun's already half-hard cock over his pajamas without warning or preamble. "You're not making me do anything, I'd already offered." At Seunghyun's groan, Seungri had taken Seunghyun full in his hand and rubbed him calmly through the cloth. "Besides, it's not as if I'm wrong. It's obvious that you really need it."

That had been a Seungri staple—smugness lacing his words, even if most people his age would admit themselves into therapy from the shame and trauma of thinking it alone. Seunghyun had suddenly been faced with the realization that Seungri had grown up, and that what they'd been doing hadn't been Seunghyun taking care of him any longer, but something more mutual, something that Seungri would want to reclaim control of.

"Get on with it, then," Seunghyun had said, and he could swear Seungri had ducked his head coquettishly as a front to hide his smirk. "Seungri."

"Yes, hyung?" Seungri had lilted, much like a song, as he'd knelt down to the floor and started tugging at Seunghyun's pants, and Seunghyun had forgotten all of what he was about to say. "Have you ever done this before?"

"What? Have my dick sucked?" Seunghyun had asked, lifting his hips up to help Seungri along, "Obviously."

"Obviously," Seungri had parroted, and then shimmied closer, close enough that Seunghyun could feel his breath on his bare cock. "You're T.O.P-hyung. Everyone probably wants to suck your cock."

" _Seungri_ ," Seunghyun had gritted out, exorbitantly loving the filth that came out of Seungri's mouth, and because that same mouth had tipped itself down to flick a tongue experimentally over his slit, "Come on, what is this—"

"Have you ever sucked someone's cock?" Seungri had persisted on, and Seunghyun had become reaware of Jiyong doing his encore in the background, flashing with glitter and colour and light, not unlike how he'd been the first time Seunghyun had swallowed him into his mouth.

Seungri had picked up on his distraction, had always been more perceptive than people had given him credit for. "Oh."

"Seungri," Seunghyun had said, cautious, not liking the way Seungri's face suddenly closed off, the way it sparked a trail of guilt in Seunghyun's gut in place of lust. They'd never talked about Seunghyun's history with Jiyong, Seunghyun assuming that he'd already known and hadn't minded, but looking at Seungri then, trying to keep his desolation at bay, Seunghyun knew that he'd made a grievous mistake. "Hey, Seunghyun. Look at me."

The novelty of calling him by his real name had done the trick. Seungri had looked up at Seunghyun, face as young as it'd been all those years ago, when Jiyong had been vicious in his contempt and Seunghyun foolish in his indifference and all Seungri'd wanted to do was forget.

"It's not like that anymore," Seunghyun had said, taking Seungri's chin between thumb and forefinger so he wouldn't look away, "Me and Jiyong—there's nothing there. Not like that. I would've told you if there still was."

Seungri had stayed quiet, but not disbelieving, and Seunghyun had been glad because he'd meant it. Whatever it was that he and Jiyong had, still have, and whatever it was that he and Seungri were doing then, it wouldn't have come before Seungri's feelings for Jiyong. Seunghyun understood that, and he'd wanted Seungri to understand that he would never— _could_  never—do that to him even if he'd tried. 

That should've been signal number two, but Seunghyun had remained unenlightened, because all of a sudden Seungri's mouth was engulfing him whole, skipping inches upon inches and taking him right to the back of his throat, jaw stretched and cheeks hollowed and skin dusted the prettiest red, and Seunghyun hadn't ever seen anything more beautiful, felt anything more breathtaking, heard anything more beguiling than the way Seungri had sucked him off to the high heavens Youngbae and Daesung's holy books had preached about, and all that hadn't been addressed in the beyond.

Hyperbolic, maybe, but Seunghyun genuinely felt like he hadn't come that hard in ten of his twenty-three years being alive. Chest heaving and cock twitching in its aftershocks, Seunghyun had thrown Seungri's question right back at him in wonder, "Have  _you_  ever done this before?"

But Seungri had just smiled, close-lipped, wiped the drip of Seunghyun's come that had trickled down his throat, and then he'd climbed back up on the couch beside Seunghyun, cranking the TV volume up for a Family Outing rerun.

It had left Seunghyun to clean up after himself with a tissue, to tuck himself back in his pants, to think about how Seungri's silence had always meant  _yes_ , and how his stomach had pitted out in something hot and feral at the thought, only to realize what it'd been halfway into Lee Hyori's squabble with Kim Jongkook on-screen: pure, unadulterated jealousy. 

That had been the third signal; three strikes, and yet Seunghyun couldn't count himself disqualified, because he'd suddenly found himself right in the heart of the pitch, playing for the long haul in a game that he'd never even wanted to take part in to begin with. 

 

 

 

 

After the crowds have gone and the stages dismantled, Seunghyun corners Jiyong in the hallway underground before he can reach their dressing rooms.

"What did you do to Seungri?" Seunghyun asks, aiming for stern and only hitting at weary. He doesn't know why he's doing this; he doesn't know why he does anything.

Jiyong, for his part, squints his eyes at him and manages not to look too sick of his shit. "Besides the ordinary? Nothing."

Seunghyun is on the brink of mania and fatigued as hell, excusing chronologia, but he has enough cognizance to discern Jiyong's cutthroat flippancy. "Jesus—fuck you. You're such an asshole, Jiyong, such a fucking—"

" _I'm_  the asshole?" Jiyong asks in confoundment, eyes finally showing more of their whites, dashes of red. "What the hell are you talking about? You're the one accosting me like some corrupt fucking cop."

They both tense at the mention of the police force. Jiyong knows of his trepidation about enlistment, has seen the worst bouts of his anxiety-ridden nights, but he'd still said it, because Jiyong is the biggest fucking asshole Seunghyun knows, but fundamentally, still the softest: he lets out a sigh and rummages through his pockets and clamps a cigarette in between Seunghyun's lips, igniting the end with his PEACEMINUSONE lighter and telling him to, "Breathe, Seunghyun," as Seunghyun desperately tries to centre himself in the din.

"I'm sorry," Jiyong says eventually, when Seunghyun acclimatizes to the even pacing of inhaling and exhaling through his cigarette. "You're right, I'm sorry. I'm an asshole. I shouldn't have said that."

Seunghyun slumps against the wall, thunks his head down to rest on Jiyong's bony shoulder, forgives. "You shouldn't have." 

"I'm sorry," Jiyong repeats. He lights his own cigarette, entertains the both of them with a few rings of smoke. Seunghyun feels calm, until Jiyong starts speaking once again. "But with Seungri—I didn't do anything to him. We've been doing the same shit for ten straight years," Jiyong pauses, twisting his neck around to look at Seunghyun. "I don't know what to tell you anymore, hyung. I'm sorry."

"It's fine." It's not, but Seunghyun can still lie. Lies are pretty much the only things he has left, at this point. "He's projecting again."

Pressed up this close, he can feel the minutiae of Jiyong's muscle movements, how his facial features contort into disarray. "What?"

"Seungri," Seunghyun says, can't stop now that he's started. "Projecting. That first night we fucked, when you'd gone out on some date—he'd said something about me that was really about you. Now he's doing it all over again."

Jiyong hums, thoughtful, as if trying to remember. Seunghyun wouldn't blame him if he doesn't; only Seunghyun seems to remember useless details like that. "What'd he say?"

"That we say things we don't mean, and then expect him to laugh, like we treat him as one big joke," Seunghyun says, feeling lighter with every word hefted out. "That was the last time."

Jiyong takes the forgotten cigarette from between Seunghyun's fingers, tapping the ash off of it before placing it back, "What about now?"

Seunghyun sucks in too deep, ends up wheezing through coughs when he says, "He said— _fuck_ —he called me a wimp. That I give up way before I even try."

"Definitely sounds like you," Jiyong says, lip curling up coolly on one side as he chuckles, and Seunghyun fixes his gaze on it, thinking that if he just stares at Jiyong long enough then maybe he'd fall back in love with him and the pain in his chest would finally abate. "Not to be conceited, though, but that doesn't sound like me."

In his current state, Jiyong looks a little too bodily fragile, a little too much like he'd physically snap if Seunghyun held him the way he wanted to hold Seungri, but that's fine, Seunghyun can get used to that again; he's already conditioned himself to use a light touch when handling the shards of Seungri's emotions, and that should constitute as a transferable skill. Seunghyun can be versatile, he can prove Seungri wrong.

"Hyung," Jiyong nudges his shoulder, bouncing Seunghyun's head awake and back into the present. "Did you hear what I just said? I said—"

"That that doesn't sound like you," Seunghyun cuts in testily. It's hard to want to fall in love with Jiyong when he keeps moving around and ruining his vantage point, much less can he actually try it. "I get it. Now shut up."

Jiyong laughs. The mirage breaks. Seunghyun hadn't even stopped hurting yet, and already he's spiralling back to where he'd come from, wants to be. "Why are you laughing?"

"Because I'm an asshole," Jiyong brandishes, like it's some year-end award to be honoured by, and then flicks the cigarette butt out of Seunghyun's mouth, lets it land on flammable carpet five steps away. "And because you're an idiot, hyung."

Seunghyun doesn't need the reminder. "I knew I came to you for a reason."

"No, really, you're—" Jiyong stops, shakes his head, redirects. Like they've rewinded ten years, pounding pavement in the practice rooms, and Seunghyun had just taken a step to the left when he should've stepped to the right, Jiyong simmering with disappointment along the sidelines. Leader. "I wanna help you, but some things you really just have to work out for yourself." He takes another drag of his cigarette, pensive, before adding, "One step at a time. You'll get there. Just don't beat yourself up later for having had gone at your own pace."

Jiyong's almost getting good at being therapeutic. He should really consider pursuing a PhD once there's nothing left to prove for him in being an idol; not that that's a lot, of course, but Jiyong's always been the perfectionist, even with the little things that didn't quite need any mastery. Seungri thinks he's perfect regardless, and that should've been enough for Jiyong. It would be for Seunghyun. "I don't know what that means."

"You'll get there," Jiyong says again, pats him comfortingly on the head, and Seunghyun feels an overwhelming pang of yearning for Jiyong; not for the Jiyong he'd fucked around with, nor for the Jiyong that he'd thought he'd loved, but for the Jiyong that used to be his best friend. "Even if you have to figure things out by yourself, you don't have to go through it alone."

"That doesn't make sense either," Seunghyun says, but he appreciates it. Their relationship won't ever be the same after the break-ups, the fan entitlement, the ghost in between two bodies, but it can still be somewhat restored. Seunghyun has hope. "Thank you."

"Jiyong-hyung, have you seen—oh," the voice abruptly comes and abruptly halts, rounding the corner with a skid of rubber against vinyl. Seunghyun knows who it is without having to look up. "You're both here."

Seunghyun also knows what Seungri must be thinking, seeing him and Jiyong entwined like this. Seunghyun knows, because he's spent years cataloguing every kind of shimmer in Seungri's eyes, and the one he has on right now is probably Seunghyun's least favourite.

"Did you need us?" Jiyong haughts, like the diva that he can be, but it's mostly just to mess with Seungri. He stands up shortly, leaves Seunghyun's head careening towards the floor, and Seunghyun's tired enough to just let himself fall.

Seungri's somehow able to crouch down and catch him with one hand cradling the side of his head before he can crack his skull, the skin of his palm roughened but warm against the shell of Seunghyun's ear. "Jeez, hyung—be careful."

"It's not my fault," Seunghyun mumbles, tries not to burrow himself into the heat, to read too much into it. It's probably just Seungri's honed reflexes kicking in; when all else fails, Seunghyun's trump card is to blame the jiu-jitsu. "Jiyong stood up too fast."

"My bad," Jiyong apologizes, but he's already halfway down the hall, vanishing merrily behind an intersection of walls. So much for rekindled friendship.

Which leaves just Seunghyun and Seungri, confined in a small space, alone. Seunghyun sits up, extricates himself from Seungri's hold, crosses one leg over the other and clears his throat. "Are we leaving soon?"

Seungri looks just about as awkward as Seunghyun feels, but he can still look Seunghyun straight in the eye, even with Seunghyun putting all his effort into averting his gaze. "Fifteen minutes. Should've been five, but you and Jiyong-hyung disappeared."

"De-stressed," Seunghyun corrects, with all the panache he can muster, but Seungri just keeps on staring at him blankly. "Live a little, Seungri-yah. Bend the rules, break free."

"I live well enough, thanks," Seungri says, and he does, that's an empirical fact—or yacht, Seungri has a yacht—so Seunghyun doesn't argue with it. "Are  _you_  living?"

Seunghyun's stumped by the inquiry. Is he or isn't he; of course he is, but the section in his brain that likes to be cliché and contrary wonders: does that mean he's alive? "What kind of question is that?"

"The kind you ask someone who drinks their day's entire recommended caloric intake worth of alcohol in one sitting," Seungri counters, tone clipped, and it's so unlike him that Seunghyun can believe that he's hallucinating the exchange with the Seungri in his mind who actually gives a shit about him, because the Seungri of real life is way far off, too busy only caring about Jiyong. "If you won't tell me—"

"Tell  _you_?" Seunghyun laughs, but it's gruff and mirthless and sounds like sandpaper in Seunghyun's ears. That's unlike him too, to get this angry and still show it, but Seunghyun's tired and needs a seventy-two hour nap and wants it all to just fucking  _stop_. "Why would I tell you anything? It's not like  _that_  with us, right?"

It's almost gratifying, encouraging, to see the hurt splay out on Seungri's face as he hears the words he'd told Seunghyun just over an hour ago be flung back at his face, but it's gone before Seunghyun can even memorize how it looks and Seungri's back to being tough and unreadable and impossible to whip at, years of being the maknae having had taught him well about enduring through the times that his hyungs needed to lash out, when Seunghyun needed to lash out. 

It's almost satisfying, but all Seunghyun really is is disappointed.

"Right," Seungri says, after a few beats of charged silence, and he sounds disappointed, too, in Seunghyun. Join the fucking club. "Okay, be like that, Seunghyun. See if I care the next time you get drunk and there's no one else around to listen to you cry."

It's funny, because Seunghyun feels like doing a little bit of both at the moment. "Lighten up, maknae. Even I don't take you this seriously."

"You never do," Seungri replies, and that one he says as if he's disappointed in himself. "Come on. They'll be sending Youngbae-hyung to look for us next, and you know how he can get."

That's just like Seungri, to easily jump onto another topic if the conversation doesn't go the way he'd intended it to. Seunghyun isn't sure if he should be relieved or feel jilted, but of what, he doesn't know.

But Seungri's grown up, matured, has become more sensitive even if he's still that same arrogant showman of ages past who thanked himself for his own hard work, first and foremost. He stands up and offers Seunghyun a hand, which by all means Seungri should pull away at the last moment, yell, "Sike!" and leave Seunghyun landing back on his ass, just for all that Seunghyun had said to Seungri a few minutes prior. He doesn't, and he yanks Seunghyun up to full height and helps him dust off his elbow patches of concert stadium dirt and walks beside him all the way back to their dressing rooms, not a step too forward or too far back. 

Before they can pivot the last turn to the hallway of their destination, Seungri stops him with a tug on the sleeve of his jacket to ask, "Seriously, hyung. Are you okay?" with abundant concern seeping out of his every pore and countenance.

Seunghyun ponders over it for a while. He could lie and say that he is, because that's his default, his fallback, and people didn't have the patience nor the resources to fully extract the truth from Seunghyun, Seungri not excluding.

But it takes a lot of energy to lie—to Seungri, about Seungri—and Seunghyun's so beyond tired. And the warmth along the length of his side isn't going away, constant, and it's because Seungri's still stitched to him, hasn't yet detached himself from his press against Seunghyun's arm.

So Seunghyun bucks the trend, says, "No," and even if he isn't, even if his fingers hold a tremor when he reaches over to cover Seungri's hand, Seunghyun doesn't mind because Seungri doesn't move to pull away. "But I'll get there."

Seunghyun is alone, but not really; Seungri's right there with him, just as alone as he is, and that's a selfish thought, but it's enough. For now, Seunghyun thinks it's enough.

 

 

 

 

Seunghyun had never been selfish until Seungri.

Selfishness had always been more of Jiyong's speed: wanting to debut just as GDYB and throwing hissy fits a quantitative thirty-four times a day when he doesn't get it, gets BIGBANG instead; writing  _Lies_  for himself and crying over four nights when Yang-sajangnim tells him that they'll use it for the group rather than for the solo he was told would be in the works; fucking his way through the night scene of the general Seoul area and coming home reeking of smoke and sex, sidling beside Seungri in bed as if Seungri hadn't been laid awake for hours, waiting for him to return.

Seunghyun had come home during those same nights—arrived from the same places as Jiyong, talked to the same faces as Jiyong—and would always wait in the commons of their dorm as Jiyong sneaked quietly into his and Seungri's room, collapsed on their mattress, until the digital clock above the television beeped twenty minutes, and Seungri would shuffle out of their door with his eyes rimmed with dark circles and a muted tinge of red.

Seunghyun had never been selfish, but on those nights, he could only think of himself.

"Seungri-yah," he would croon, smiling lazily up at him when Seungri passed him on the couch. "Come and give hyung a kiss."

And Seungri would roll his eyes, but he'd stoop down to plant one long, searing kiss on Seunghyun's lips. "Where'd you two come from this time?"

"Hongdae," Seunghyun would murmur against Seungri's mouth, pulling him by the arm so that he'd straddle his lap. "A new bar opened downtown. You should come and check it out with us next time. It's boring without you there to make a fool of yourself."

Seungri would laugh, but it wouldn't sound like he'd thought it all that funny. "And watch him pick up twelve different girls in the span of three minutes? No, thanks, I'd rather stay bored at home."

By that point, Seunghyun would have already slipped a hand up Seungri's shirt, brushing his thumb over a nipple and relishing the way Seungri arched into him with the light touch. "As if you wouldn't be doing the same. Who's BIGBANG's resident playboy again?"

"You've really gotta stop reading tabloid exclusives," Seungri would say, just a tad bit breathless, and Seunghyun would rejoice in how Seungri'd lost most of his rigidity and actually started sounding like he was enjoying himself. "It's frying your brains."

"You fry my brains," Seunghyun would quip, laying the cheese on thick, and Seungri would giggle adorably as Seunghyun blew raspberries against Seungri's neck. "You're so fucking hot, baby boy, I can't help but get burned."

"Hyung—hyung, stop," Seungri would say, lowering his tone a couple of pitches more than necessary, and Seunghyun's cock would leap in his pants and Seunghyun wouldn't stop, because Seunghyun didn't want to and knew Seungri didn't, either. "You're gonna wake Youngbae-hyung and Daesung-hyung up."

"Oh, so you don't care if we wake up Jiyong, do you?" Seunghyun would taunt, moving his lips to push at the loose cloth of Seungri's shirt, exposing more skin, and rocking his hips up wildly so that both he and Seungri were moaning at the sweet friction. "You want him to catch us, don't you? You want him to see me fuck you stupid on this couch, just to see what he's been missing out on? That's what you want, right?"

" _Hyung_ ," Seungri would gasp, voice breaking in that way that indicated that Seungri really would wake up everyone in-house, just so that Seunghyun would finally fuck him the way he'd been describing. "Seunghyun-hyung,  _fuck_ —"

"What's that?" Seunghyun would ask measuredly, as if he wasn't also dying to rip Seungri apart. "Fuck what, Seungri?"

"Me," Seungri would answer in an instant, scrabbling at the buckle of Seunghyun's belt, and Seunghyun would finally let him. "Fuck me, hyung, please—"

Which Seunghyun would, rooting for the condom and the packet of lube he always carried in the depths of his pockets, had fucked Seungri with his face pushed down on the couch's backrest and his ass popped out tantalizingly for Seunghyun to hammer into until he'd come, quickly turning Seungri right side up afterwards so that he could bring him off in his mouth.

In the aftermath, Seungri would lie himself down along the inside of the couch, and Seunghyun would crowd him further against it to accommodate for his longer limbs, and then they'd pant and struggle for breath but their heartbeats would align in perfect sync. Seunghyun would feel it when he'd wrap an arm around Seungri and haul him over towards him so that they'd be pressed from chest to chest.

Seunghyun had already known by then what he'd felt for Seungri, but he hadn't wanted to give it a name, hadn't wanted to give it too much power. In those moments, Seunghyun would lower his guard, and he'd call it for what it is in his head when he'd look down at Seungri, concede.

"Do you think I could DJ, hyung?" Seungri had asked, specifically on that night, after their breathing had evened out to mimic sleep.

"What?" Seunghyun had laughed, thinking that it was just one of Seungri's random conversation starters, but Seungri hadn't smiled along and Seunghyun had realized that he was being serious. "I guess you could. You're already a producer, aren't you?"

"That's different, though," Seungri had replied, letting out a soft sigh, had snuggled closer underneath Seunghyun's arm. He could be so tender, when he was being honest, and Seunghyun had often wondered if Jiyong saw Seungri like this too, because if he had, then there'd have been no reason for Jiyong not to fall in love with Seungri. "That's behind the scenes. DJ-ing is more of a stage performance than it is actual mixing of beats."

"You're good at performing too," Seunghyun had told him, because he really was, but it wasn't just that—Seungri could sing and dance with the best of them, but he could also breathe life back into a dying crowd. "Why the sudden interest?"

Just as swiftly as Seungri had opened himself up, he had also shielded himself off. "Nothing. Just wondering."

Seungri was confidence personified, except for the times when he wasn't, and Seunghyun knew most of the reasons why he'd waver, or the biggest one, at least. "Seungri."

Seungri had grinned, said, "What? I really am just wondering." Seungri knew that Seunghyun knew, because he'd never failed to say that he'd always been jealous of Seunghyun. "I don't know if it'd be worth it, anyhow. You and Jiyong-hyung's popularity are on a whole different level now."

They had just finished a huge chunk of GD&TOP promotions, and it'd been prosperous, which is why him and Jiyong had been celebrating with their friends in Hongdae. Seunghyun never really got his own appeal, no matter how many times people came up to him and told him how enigmatic he was, but he couldn't objectively deny that regardless of the venue or the occasion, his name always brought out the loudest screams, only rivaled by the ones that were meant for Jiyong.

That didn't mean Seungri couldn't generate hysteria for himself, though. Jiyong—and maybe Seunghyun, to an extent—may have been born to be stars, but Seungri had been  _made_  to be one, all from his own doing. "Stop saying that. People love you just as much as the rest of us, even though I can't pretend to know why."

"Wow, thanks a lot, hyung," Seungri had said dryly, and Seunghyun had smacked a loud kiss on his forehead in conciliation. "But no, they don't. I talk to women thinking that they're actually interested in me, and then ten seconds later, they're telling me how hot T.O.P is and asking me for your number."

Seungri hadn't sounded too bothered, more like it'd been a fun anecdote to reveal on their next variety show appearance, so Seunghyun hadn't held his own grin back when he'd said, "Well, don't you agree? I wouldn't mind a few threesomes."

"And they call me dirty," Seungri had grumbled, but there'd been a blush on his face that signified that he'd liked the thought even more than Seunghyun did—which wasn't really saying much, because Seunghyun didn't actually like it; all he'd wanted was to keep Seungri for himself. "You're hot, but you're not  _that_ hot."

Seunghyun had crowed, faux scandalized. "Me, the fantastic T.O.P? You take that back."

"You have a complex," Seungri had said, mocking consternation, and Seunghyun couldn't disagree: loving Seungri, letting him fuck him and use him as a crutch for Jiyong, all the while knowing that Seungri would never love him back. "It's worrying. You should really get some help."

Seunghyun really, really should have. "Seungri-yah."

"Mhm?" Seungri had buzzed, eyes already closed, head slotted perfectly underneath Seunghyun's chin. If Seunghyun's pulse had sped up faster than its partner on Seungri's, then what of it? "What is it?"

"You'd be an amazing DJ," Seunghyun had said, mostly to the dark, but he could feel Seungri's lips stretching into a smile against the skin on his chest. " _Victory_ -ssi can do anything he puts his mind to."

When Seungri hadn't laughed at his heavily accented English, Seunghyun had tweaked his head down to look at Seungri, and he'd seen the smile on his face turn indelibly sad. "That's not true, hyung, but I'm happy that you seem to think so."

Seunghyun couldn't disagree with that, either. Seungri, for all his hard and enduring work, couldn't also ever get Jiyong to love him back. "Come out clubbing with me next time. I'll introduce you to some of the more established DJs, if you want."

Seungri's smile had gone back to being buoyant, so Seunghyun had graded his attempt at consolation as passable. "Wow, T.O.P-hyung's really as cool as they say, huh?"

"Shut it," Seunghyun had said—he couldn't deny his popularity, true, but that hadn't meant he liked it whenever people brought it up—and Seungri had only parted his lips wider for another round of giggling, so Seunghyun had bent over to kiss it for him shut.

The next time he and Jiyong had gone clubbing, Seungri  _had_  come with them, and Seunghyun had facilitated introductions just as he'd promised.

When Seungri had migrated permanently towards the DJ booth for the night, Seunghyun had looked up to the sound of mic feedback and saw Seungri at the helm, hands on the turnstiles, headphones hanging low on his ears. "I'd like to dedicate this song to T.O.P-hyung, who looks so handsome with that blond hair!" When the club erupted in a cacophony of female screams and a couple of male hoots, Seungri had smiled winningly over his audience. "Ladies and a few gentlemen, you agree with me, don't you?"

More cheering, and Seunghyun had glared at Seungri from across the room, but Seungri had just focused his grin solely at him, spectacularly wicked. "This one's for T.O.P-hyung!"

 _Turn It Up_  had played, and Seungri had scratched some disks and made novice mistakes, but the DJ beside him had rectified each one, standing closer to Seungri than Seunghyun would've liked. Seunghyun would forget all about his jealousy, eventually, because every time Seungri had cut a beat just right, he would look over at Seunghyun and beam only at him, appearing so fucking proud, but still just as authentically shy.

"You look happy," Jiyong had commented, suddenly appearing right beside him. Seunghyun would've afforded him a glance in surprise, but he couldn't take his eyes off of Seungri. "I thought you'd be mad at him. You're usually embarrassed when he does something like this."

"Just thankful that I really am that handsome," Seunghyun had said as his excuse, but he knew Jiyong hadn't believed him. Seunghyun hadn't cared; Seungri hadn't looked at Jiyong, not even once, and that had been all that mattered. "Let's party, Jiyongie!"

Seungri would get his punishment later, back at home, when Seunghyun would refuse to let Seungri come until he'd apologized, begging for Seunghyun's cock even as Seunghyun had decided to take mercy and hadn't let up on the excruciatingly fast pace of his fucking until Seungri did come.

"I love you," Seunghyun had whispered after, mouthing it in between Seungri's shoulder blades, but only when he'd been sure that Seungri was sound asleep. "I fucking love you so much, Seungri."

Power had been way too overrated, anyway.

 

 

 

 

Weeks pass, the list of overseas fan meetings they have to do shortening, but Seunghyun's schedules never clear, and suddenly he's the farthest he's ever felt from home and crying about it to Youngbae, five glasses of champagne in. 

"I'm running out of time," he says through incredulous laughs and hiccups, and rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms. "I'm running out of time, Youngbae. I don't know what to do."

Youngbae rests a hand on his shoulder, attentive. Daesung's always had the most soothing presence when it comes to Seunghyun, but Youngbae's always been the best listener. "Running out of time for what, hyung?"

"I don't know," Seunghyun says, and that's the problem. Seunghyun doesn't fucking  _know_. "I don't know. But I know I have to do something soon, or I'll really fucking die."

"You won't," Youngbae says, tone sharper than Seunghyun's ever heard Youngbae use on him before. "You're strong. You can do it. And if you can't, then we're always going to be here for you—all of us. Jiyong, Daesung, Seungri—"

Seunghyun starts choking from the force of his next laugh, painful bursts of air trying to claw out of his chest. "Seungri? When the fuck is he ever around?"

Youngbae stops dead in his tracks. He might be the most neutral party out of the whole group, but even he can't refute that. "I'm sure if you called—"

"Why am I the one always calling?" Seunghyun protests, louder than what even he'd expected. He's so drunk, and he hadn't even polished off the damn bottle yet. "Why is it me who has to call? I'm the hyung, the one leaving in a few weeks, but he still can't even bother to check in on me to see if I'm okay?"

Youngbae stays quiet for a minute and a half, or at least Seunghyun thinks he does. He only manages to count up to ninety, in his inebriation. "I didn't know you called him up that much."

Seunghyun immediately sobers up at that. "I don't," he says, brings his champagne flute up to eye level and stares at the meniscus of fluid. "Would it still be considered a call if no one picks up?"

"I guess not," Youngbae humours him with an actual answer. Seunghyun nods, and then empties out the rest of his glass with one giant gulp. "About Seungri—"

"Let's not talk about the maknae," Seunghyun's quick to snuff out, refills his glass until wine sloshes over onto the tablecloth below. "He already talks about himself way too much. Let's not give him any more satisfaction."

Seunghyun can detect pity in Youngbae's stare, but at least he stops talking about Seungri. "How's your girlfriend, hyung?"

"My girlfriend?" Seunghyun doesn't do girlfriends, only that's not right; he did have a girlfriend, but that's the keyword:  _did_. He'd had her until he hadn't, until she'd told him that it wasn't working out, that she couldn't keep on giving when Seunghyun won't give,  _can't_  give anything back, and Seunghyun had just filed it away as another thing to talk to his therapist about when she pursues the topic of his issues with intimacy. "She's fine. Doing well for herself, did a couple of magazine spreads."

"I see," Youngbae says, but it doesn't sound revelatory. He sounds like he knows something Seunghyun doesn't. "I read somewhere that she's been dating some other model, though."

"Is she now?" That's news to Seunghyun. He wishes her well; she'd been a nice girl,  _is_  a nice girl, and she deserves to be with someone who isn't unavailable, someone who doesn't compare and hold her up to a standard that no one but Seungri can live up to—ah, there he goes again, thinking about Seungri when he'd already said aloud that he wouldn't be giving him the satisfaction. "That bitch."

"Seunghyun," Youngbae castigates, frowning, and Seunghyun casts him a regretful smile.

"Sorry, Youngbae-ah," Seunghyun says. Youngbae can be such a heterosexual. Or would it be a feminist? Seunghyun's been lagging on updating himself on current social justice buzzwords. "I'm just hurt. She didn't even tell me she'd been seeing other people."

Youngbae looks pained for a short second, before saying, "It's not my business, but...haven't you been seeing someone else, too?" and Seunghyun understands why.

"Are you calling me a cheater?" Seunghyun challenges, but there's no malice in it. Youngbae hadn't meant his question in any type of way, because that's just how good Youngbae is at being non-threatening, so Seunghyun doesn't take any of it personally.

"No," Youngbae says firmly, and Seunghyun prepares himself for a lecture. "I'm just—if you love someone else, hyung, just go and tell them. Stop trying to date other girls when you know all along that they won't ever be enough."

Seunghyun's grin ices, frigid with its grit. It's easy for Youngbae to say that; he'd dated other girls and played the field like the rest of them, but Hyorin had been the first girl he'd ever truly loved, so there hadn't been any doubt. Even if Hyorin had rejected him, Youngbae would've been fine, because he hadn't known what it felt like to love so much and for so long that it seeped out from your heart and into your bones and stunted every move you made and ceased time as if it doesn't exist, hadn't known what it felt like to look that monster in the eye from every corner of his vision, day after day after grueling fucking day. 

Now he's really getting sappy. Seunghyun should really commit to abstaining from alcohol altogether. "That's too idealistic even for you."

Youngbae doesn't cower. "Seungri deserves to know."

Smoking, he'll stick to. In fact, he's going to smoke through a whole pack right now.

"You know?" Seunghyun asks, too defeated to deny it as he lights up a fresh cigarette.

"Since time," Youngbae says. Of course. Seunghyun doesn't know if it's Youngbae's foolproof intuition, or if Seunghyun had grown imprudent, or if Seungri's just that impervious. Maybe all of the above. "It's kinda hard not to know when Seungri can't ever keep quiet during sex."

Seunghyun dignifies that with a chortle. He loves when Seungri's loud during sex. He loves when Seungri's loud outside of sex. He just loves Seungri, period. Fuck. "Just because we have sex doesn't mean we're in love, Youngbae-ah."

" _You_  are," Youngbae points out singularly, accurately, and he doesn't say that meanly either but Seunghyun still feels a little bit wounded. "And hyung, it's been so long, I think it's about time you told him that—"

Seunghyun's landline rings. Seunghyun would let it go to voicemail, just to hear how Youngbae's going to finish his sentence—somehow, it hadn't sounded like he was going to end with  _you love him_ —but only Seunghyun's mom calls him on his landline, so he doesn't. He smiles thinly at Youngbae, who looks sour, says, "Sorry, gotta take that," and stands to pick up the phone.

"Eomma," Seunghyun says into the receiver, and it feels like the first real breath he's taken in some time.

"How are you, Seunghyun?" his mom asks, and if the worry's there without much prompting, then Seunghyun disregards it. "You're doing okay? You have everything you need?"

"Yeah," Seunghyun says. A lie, as is customary of any conversation Seunghyun has nowadays, it seems. "Yeah, eomma. I'm good. And you?"

Youngbae's blurry through the smoke coming off the end of Seunghyun's cigarette, when Seunghyun turns to look, but he's still there. Seunghyun still has that.

 

 

 

 

It'd been Jiyong to address the elephant in the room first. 

"Hyung," Jiyong had said to him just before they were about to perform  _Knockout_ , the two of them already stood on the platform, ready to ascend. Seungri was hyping up the audience in rapid-fire Japanese somewhere above, and Seunghyun had been trying to translate the few words that he'd understood in his head. "I know Seungri's hot, and that you're obsessed with his hotness, or whatever, but try to tone it down a bit for the public, alright?"

Seunghyun knew that Jiyong knew about him and Seungri, but he wasn't sure to what breadth did his knowledge extend to, so he'd just laughed, said, "You're telling  _me_  to tone down the obsession? You're the one practically dry-humping him on stage from opening to encore."

Unlike Jiyong, Seunghyun had so far been victorious in keeping his jealousy covert, but it had leaked out a little in that answer, evident from how high Jiyong had quirked up his eyebrows.

"Relax, it's just fanservice," Jiyong had said, almost patronizingly. Overhead, Seungri had probably told one of his gag-man jokes, because Seunghyun could hear the collective groan of the crowd. "You know I don't look at him like that."

In terms of Jiyong, that had basically been an approval, a turn of hand, an implied  _he's yours, hyung_ , even though that hadn't been true; as long as Jiyong was around—which he obviously always was—Seungri could never really be Seunghyun's, and Seunghyun had been resigned to be okay with that.

 _Usually_  okay with that. Something about that day, about Jiyong being the one to have jogged his memory on it, had inexplicably gotten to him. "Why don't you, then? You know he's been in love with you ever since we'd started."

Jiyong had the decency to look aggrieved. "Because you love him."

So he did know everything, Seunghyun remembers thinking, but he hadn't known what to do with that information. He'd just sucked at his spit, ran a hand through his gel-coiffed hair, and said, "Don't pretend as if you're doing this for my sake. If you really wanted him, then you would've already taken him away," because Seunghyun was selfish, but Jiyong all the more so.

"So what if it's because I don't want him?" Jiyong had shrugged, not unkindly, but Jiyong had a finesse for making the most innocuous statements sound like a stab to the gut. "Either way, wouldn't it be more cruel to pretend to love him back?"

Seunghyun hadn't gotten the chance to respond, because Seungri had finally stopped talking and the platform had risen up, which was all just as well; Seunghyun wouldn't have had an answer, not right away, because the entire situation had been cruel no matter how you looked at it—Seungri loving Jiyong and Jiyong not loving him back; Seunghyun loving Seungri and Seungri not even knowing, just to rub salt on the dehiscenced wound of Seungri not loving him back.

They'd performed. The fans had gone ballistic. The others had re-entered the stage, Seungri yapping about how cool GD-san and T.O.P-san were, which was an exultation Seunghyun understood in every language.

Seunghyun tried not to look with all his might, but Seungri  _had_  looked so fucking hot; with his hair finally grown out from its military cut and styled up to almost mirror Seunghyun's, his button down opened, the wifebeater underneath clinging to his body like the sweat on his skin, the white pants making his legs look like angel wings if they'd wrapped around Seunghyun's waist.

Seunghyun didn't use the word  _ravish_  lightly, but that's all he'd wanted to do to Seungri even as he'd pulled a dumb face, flocking once again to Jiyong, so Seunghyun had done what he always did whenever he'd felt he was paying too much attention to Seungri: he'd transferred all his attention to Daesung.

And it worked. Apparently, participating in fan service could also distract you from some of your most basal inner compulsions; Seunghyun hadn't even thought about Seungri's mid-show semi until he was faced with and sucking it down backstage, knelt behind a stray parapet so that no one could see.

" _Seunghyun_ ," Seungri had moaned, jerking as he'd come, and Seunghyun had changed his mind last minute from spitting it out to swallowing it all, because it'd been his weakness whenever Seungri forgot to call him  _hyung_ ; there'd been that sensationalized story on Night After Night about it, and everything, but Seunghyun had been totally fine keeping that part of the narrative to himself.

When he'd finished, Seunghyun had pulled off of Seungri with an obscene  _pop_. "You taste delicious, baby."

"You think you're so hot when you say that, but you're really not," Seungri had said disdainfully, but he'd been flustered, so Seunghyun had grinned knowingly, obnoxiously aware that Seungri had just been deflecting his attraction. "It sounds weird."

"Just for looking so hot today, I'll pretend to believe that," Seunghyun had stated, and zipped Seungri back into his pants with one last cheeky tap.

"I look hot everyday," Seungri had rebutted, strangely prissy, and Seunghyun had stood up looking and feeling perplexed.

"What's crawled up your ass?" Seunghyun had asked, equally galling, because he hadn't been in the mood to talk Seungri down from a childish outburst at the time, the recollection of Jiyong knowing all about his feelings killing his post-show vibe.

"Obviously not you," Seungri had snapped, nose stuck up in the air like a homing device, and Seunghyun had pushed his back to the wall, encasing him between the two hands he'd leant against the bricks on either side of his head.

"Is that what you want, then?" Seunghyun had murmured lowly, close enough in body that his lips had been almost touching Seungri's, but he'd pulled away every time Seungri had moved in for a kiss, earned him a spiteful glare with each reiteration. "You want me up your ass?"

Seungri had actually  _snarled_. "Fuck you." Seungri had wanted to make a visual impact for the comeback, working hard to gain muscle over the break, and it had paid off; Seunghyun had to stumble back a fair amount of steps so that he could balance himself after Seungri's shove. "Not now, I don't."

"Seungri," Seunghyun had implored, catching Seungri by the arm before he could scamper away. "What's wrong?"

"You!" Seungri had bellowed, and Seunghyun had let him go from the shock. "If you're going to leave me alone, then just do it completely! You can't keep going back and forth between me and Daesung-hyung."

Seunghyun had literally been speechless. All that time, Seunghyun had been secretly steaming over the perpetual  _Nyongtory_  show, and there Seungri had been, yelling like an envious kid losing his spotlight just because Seunghyun had hung his arm over Daesung's shoulder for a little too long than what their PR requires.

It had pleased Seunghyun, the hope planted like a seed in his chest. "You're jealous of Daesung?"

Seungri had floundered; even his shark's anger couldn't free him from the net he'd been caught in. "What? No! Why the hell would I be jealous? It's just fan service."

Seunghyun hadn't even mentioned what Seungri was jealous of Daesung for, but Seungri'd already filled in the blanks. "Then why are you so mad?"

"I'm not," Seungri had said, meeker than he'd been during most of their confrontation, and then he'd pouted and groused, "Let's just go back to the dressing rooms, hyung."

"Are you in love with me?" Seunghyun had asked, mouth— _heart_ —running faster than his brain, and both him and Seungri had frozen in place, animals unable to run away from captivity.

But it'd been Seunghyun who'd lead them towards the trap, so it'd been him to take the first step forward. "Well?"

A fatal error. Because Seungri had looked at him, face drawn in remorse, and allowed him to be fed to the dogs. "No, hyung. Not with you."

Seunghyun had promptly laughed it off, but he'd felt like he'd been torn limb for limb. "Of course not. I was just playing with you, maknae. We all know you're Jiyong's."

Acting had finally lent him a purpose; Seungri had eaten up every word on his script. "Yeah, well. He doesn't."

The beast that had been sprouting inside Seunghyun, the one provoked by having been used as sacrificial bait, vengefully slashed at Seungri's throat. "Oh, trust me, he does."

Seungri's face had gone completely still, which for Seungri, was an incredible feat. "What?"

"He knows you love him," Seunghyun had said, but caught himself before he'd upended the rest of his scathe.  _H_ _e just doesn't care._

"Oh," Seungri had said, breath fluttering the tips of his hair. "Well, okay. Whatever."

"That's it?" Seunghyun had asked, unconvinced. Seunghyun didn't even have half of Seungri's flair for melodrama, but even he would've said more than  _oh, whatever_  if he'd found out that Seungri knew he loved him all along. "This isn't some red herring before you start crying?"

"Why would I cry?" Seungri had said, as if the declaration really had been weightless and Seunghyun was just being extraordinarily thick. "It's not like it changes anything. I've already known for a long time that he's not in love with me. If he was, then he'd have said something, and he hasn't, so I'm good."

Seunghyun had been amazed. "Then why do you still love him?" Seunghyun had asked, sounding almost juvenile to his own ears.

Seungri had finally looked fazed, but even then it'd just been a notch off of the usual wattage of his grin. "Just because the person you love doesn't love you back doesn't mean you stop loving them. All you can really do is try to manage how you react to that," Seungri had said, like he was teaching him a dance move and not a life lesson, before smiling brilliantly up at Seunghyun with more of his infamous zest, "Our Seunghyunnie really is so cute, not knowing how love works, and all."

"This punk," Seunghyun had muttered, hitting lightly at the back of Seungri's neck as Seungri had laughed, but he'd been thankful for the respite. "When will you learn to respect your elders?"

"Yes, hyung," Seungri had droned, like he'd already stopped listening, and Seunghyun had cuffed him again, only for Seungri to turn a 180 and rumble out a, "You didn't seem to mind the disrespect when you'd been sucking my cock," all breathy and honeyed and going straight to Seunghyun's own forgotten erection, but all Seunghyun really could be was fond.

Forget hypotheticals; it had been impossible for Seunghyun to run out of love for Seungri, even if he hadn't loved him back, but it had been possible to love him even more than he already had.

 

 

 

 

 _where are you right now, hyung?_ Seunghyun reads, and rereads, and then rereads again, just to triple check that it really is Seungri who's messaging him.

Seunghyun considers not replying, leaving him on read, but Seunghyun's resolve is weak, only getting weaker with the corrosion of time, and quite possibly, the long-term effects of alcohol use.  _hyung's preparing to see his favourite nephew._

 _yeonjun?_  Seungri answers, and Seunghyun actually types,  _no, daesung_ , and almost sends it, before holding the backspace button on his keyboard and entering a simple,  _yes_.

Seunghyun's phone pings a notification, making it two times in a row that Seungri's responded uncharacteristically fast. Seungri must not be busy, if he has time to text Seunghyun, but he must also be bored, to keep the conversation line continuous and flowing.  _can i come?_

Seunghyun's macular vision must be degenerating.  _you don't even like kids_.

 _i like yeonjun_ , Seungri texts, no emojis, and Seunghyun can imagine the way Seungri would say it if he'd been right there in Seunghyun's room, cheeks puffed and brows grooved and voice bratty as all hell, just like it always is whenever he feels like he's got something to prove.  _if it's hyung's kids, then i'll like them_.

Yeonjun isn't Seunghyun's kid, although he loves him just as much, but Seungri already knows that, so Seunghyun tamps down on the urge to be pedantic, but he can't do much for the incomprehensible heat edging up his neck.  _only if you don't touch any of my paintings, lee ceo._

 _i'll be there_ , Seungri answers, and Seunghyun turns his phone ringer on silent before the addendum comes,  _wait for me_. Seunghyun leaves his phone over his dresser and moves to his bathroom to take a shower, stares at the soapy water circling down his drain as he tries hard not to think about how much more waiting he could do when it comes to Seungri.

Hyeyoun and his mom arrive first, and Yeonjun barrels into Seunghyun's arms the moment he opens his doors, already a quarter-way into a spiel about how he got the highest mark for his artwork in class and Seonhwa from 5-C thought he was so cool for it and would Seunghyun-samchon like to buy it from him for a minimum of 300 000 KRW?

"Already the little scheming entrepreneur," Seunghyun says, eyeing Hyeyoun over Yeonjun's tuft of hair, who only meets his gaze long-sufferingly, the way all moms do when they spend six of the seven days in a week trying to curb their child's potential for criminality. "You're gonna make a fine businessman someday, Yeonjunnie."

As if on cue, the doorbell rings. The finest businessman Seunghyun knows. Seunghyun would link them up for an early youth mentorship program, if he wasn't so sure that Yeonjun would just end up being irrevocably corrupted. God knows there's enough of Seungri in the world; there's just not enough of him for Seunghyun to keep.

Christ. So early in the day, and he already needs a drink. "I'll be right back," he says, sets Yeonjun back down on the ground beside his toys, shoulders the burden of his mom's eyes as he makes his way to the door.

"I didn't know you were expecting someone else," his mom chastises, virtue of hospitality. Seunghyun's given up trying to see the point in it when he rarely even invites anyone over to his house anymore. "You should've told me, Seunghyun."

"It's just Seungri," Seunghyun reasons out, as if that made it better. Seunghyun's extremely nervous, all of a sudden; Seungri's met his mom and sister and nephew plenty of times before—backstage at concerts, present at developmental milestones, over his shoulder as they video call, the parents' table at the semi-annual YG party—but this is the first time it'll be just the five of them at Seunghyun's villa, under such intimate circumstances, and Seunghyun doesn't know what it means that it'd been Seungri to put that into gear.

His mom just nods, anyhow, finding adequacy in Seunghyun's response. "That boy can be so charming. A little too loud for my taste, though, but it'd be nice to get to know him better."

Seungri just gets louder and louder the better you get to know him, takes up more of your space and inner faculties, but Seunghyun eschews saying all of that in favour of turning his intercom on to see Seungri scuffing his shoes against the carpet underneath his feet. "Who's there?"

"I know you can see me, hyung," Seungri says, voice tinny through the low-bit speakers of the machine, and then Seunghyun gets an eyeful of Seungri's white teeth on the screen as Seungri grins into the surveillance camera. "You like seeing me on video way too much to turn the camera off."

Seunghyun would blush, if he was the blushing type of person, because Seungri really is as shameless as they come; Seungri knew he had company over—not only that, his  _family_ —and yet he was still speaking in lewd innuendos for his initial greeting, not figuring—or not caring—that Seunghyun's mom could be hovering behind him, listening in on the impromptu reveal that her son hadn't found it in himself to find a suitable Korean girl to marry because he'd been too busy fucking his bandmate of over ten years. 

The love factor in the equation—Seunghyun doesn't want to give his mom the undue stress. Heart attack incidences were at its highest rate—or so Seungri, the Google-certified health informatic, says—and Seunghyun knows it's as much precipitated by mental and emotional toiling as it is just bad physical health.

"Shut up, my mother's here," Seunghyun hisses, even as he punches in the code to let Seungri in through his gates.

Seungri looks rueful, but not the least bit ashamed. "Sorry, didn't mean it to come out like that," he says, crossing the threshold and dissolving in grains out of Seunghyun's view.

"Eomeonim!" Seungri hollers as he walks into Seunghyun's foyer, bowing a couple perfect 90s until Seunghyun's mom tells him to straighten up or he'll end up getting a poor back, just like Seunghyun and his mercurial spine over there, to which Seungri just laughs and eases up to a 45, clasping one of his mom's hands dearly, like it was something precious, between both of his.

Some of Seunghyun's nerves subside. This, he can deal with; better that than the Seungri of weeks before, of recently. Seunghyun knows what to do with a Seungri who's an unapologetic little shit, but he doesn't know what to do with a Seungri who intentionally penetrates a little too deeply under Seunghyun's skin, his psyche, a Seungri who sees Seunghyun as more than a placeholder for an actual human being.

Hyeyoun walks up to the commotion to press a welcoming kiss on Seungri's cheek, and Yeonjun clings to her legs as he surveys Seungri from head to toe. 

Seungri notices him, bends down on one knee to give him a soft smile. "Do you remember me, Yeonjunnie?"

Yeonjun nods timidly, before reaching a stubby hand out to land on Seungri's cheek, just beneath his right eye. "Panda-ssi."

"Ah," Seungri says, smile waning minutely, and Seunghyun stifles a laugh. Seungri had always loved having an official mascot, but there always seems to be that part of him who perennially wants to be seen as older, no-nonsense. Taken more seriously. "Does Yeonjunnie like pandas?"

"Yes," Yeonjun affirms, growing bolder with each question. It doesn't ever take long for Yeonjun to warm up to newcomers, and he already kind of knows Seungri. "They're cute."

"Okay," Seungri says, the corners of his lips piquing back up to its highest points. "Would you like it if Seungri-samchon gave you a panda toy as big as Yeonjunnie?"

Yeonjun's eyes twinkle. "Yeah!" he exclaims, takes his other hand off of Hyeyoun's legs and squishes Seungri's cheeks in. "Can I have it now?"

"Yeonjun," Hyeyoun chides, and Yeonjun reels his excitement back, but his hands stay on Seungri's face. "It's rude to demand gifts."

"It's alright, noona," Seungri assures, holding gingerly onto Yeonjun's wrists, and Seunghyun marvels at how his tiny hands look relatively big when put to scale with Yeonjun's. "I don't have it with me now, but I'll make sure to give it to Seunghyunnie-samchon so that he can give it to you, okay?"

Yeonjun looks put out, but he does look more comfortable with Seungri after the blatant bribery. "Okay. If you promise."

"I promise," Seungri says, lips pushed out exaggeratedly as he shakes at Yeonjun's arms, the fat on his cheeks jiggling along with the movement. "If Seunghyun-samchon decides to keep it for himself and doesn't give it to you, well, then I'll just have to give you an even bigger one."

It's all so fucking cute, Seunghyun thinks, cavity-inducing sweetness. Seunghyun's teeth ache, and then his chest does, and then it's radiating to the rest of his body, rotting at Seunghyun one organ at a time. This is too domestic than Seunghyun has the strength for. This— _this_  is too much of what Seunghyun really wants, is too much of what Seungri can ever really give.

"I'll give it to him," Seunghyun chimes in uselessly, because everyone's already moved on in his daze: Yeonjun's dragging his mom towards his DVD collection, Hyeyoun's speaking genially with Seungri, while Seunghyun's just standing in the middle of his living room, shifting weight between his two feet.

Story of his life, to always be so late. There might be some merit to all that lecturing his therapist did about arrested development after all.

"Seunghyun-ah," his mom hails from her squat below his TV. His saviour, always. "Come over here and find the movie Yeonjun's asking for. I'm going to cook dinner."

"What does Yeonjunnie want to watch?" Seungri asks, materializing behind him when Seunghyun wanders over to obey his mom's command, the satin sleeve of his shirt skimming along the nape of Seunghyun's neck as he stretches an arm over Seunghyun's shoulder to collect the remote.

Seunghyun suppresses his shiver, or hopes that he does. "He likes watching me on TV."

Seungri looks half-amused, half-disturbed, and a negligible portion disparaging. "So you just let a three-year old watch Tazza? The Commitment?  _Into the Fire_?"

"You have to start them early on quality cinema, or else they end up having low standards, like you," Seunghyun pomps, locating the CD, knee joints creaking when he gets back up to his feet. That's a ticking time bomb if there ever was one. "But I was talking about our concerts."

Seungri grins, chuffed, an exhibitionist through and through. "He watches our concert DVDs?"

"Yeah, makes it easier to skip your parts," Seunghyun jibes, and he gets exactly what he's fishing for when Seungri's smile gradually descends into a pout. Still cute. Seunghyun still aches. "Which totals to a cumulative nineteen minutes out of the one-twenty, so it probably wastes more time to fast forward anyway."

"If you don't want me to be here, you should've just said so in the text," Seungri says, sullen, body gone to stone in front of Seunghyun. He looks good, Seunghyun thinks. Put together. Like maybe he'd expended even more effort into what he's wearing than how he usually already does, how his hair's styled, all because he'd be meeting and greeting and dining Seunghyun's family, like he's trying to impress. Maybe, just like Seunghyun, he'd been nervous himself.

What the actual fuck is Seunghyun thinking. "You really can't handle a little innocent ribbing anymore, huh. Why so uptight lately, Panda-ssi?"

"Even I get fed up of jokes sometimes," Seungri answers, straightforward, but it feels like the vaguest thing Seungri's ever said to Seunghyun. "Whatever. I'll leave in a few minutes if you think I'm intruding."

There's always been a significant distance that they've maintained between them—Seungri, by consequence, and Seunghyun, by choice—but even stepped up this close, talking to each other in hushed tones, Seunghyun has never felt the gap as poignantly as he does now. It'd take him one slight abduction of the arm and he'd be touching Seungri, but even then Seunghyun doesn't think he'd be able to reach.

Seunghyun's running out of time. "You're not."

Seungri's eyebrows—filled in meticulously with makeup, Seunghyun observes—slide down and mid to converge at the centre of his forehead. "I'm not what? Fed up?"

He knows what. After all these years, Seungri should already well fucking know what. "Intruding, idiot. You can stay."

Seunghyun chooses not to include the  _I want you to_  that keeps echoing in his brain, but Seungri seems to hear it, anyways. His face softens and the corners of his mouth curve gently upwards and the skin around his eyes wrinkle exultantly, and Seunghyun's so in love that it actually physically hurts to breathe. "Okay. Then I'll stay."

It suddenly occurs to Seunghyun that he doesn't even know why Seungri's here in the first place. He hasn't asked. "We're still skipping your parts." He still doesn't. Too afraid of the wrong answer.

"We'll see about that," Seungri says auspiciously, already making his way towards Seunghyun's couch to perch himself beside Yeonjun. "By the end of this recording, Panda-ssi's going to be everyone's favourite. Isn't that right, Yeonjunnie?"

Yeonjun squeals jubilantly as Seungri starts tickling his sides, only stopping when Seunghyun's mom emerges from his kitchen to tell him to be careful, ladle in hand to fulfill the stereotype. Seungri looks utterly contrite, resorts to pillowing Yeonjun on his lap instead, but the delicate smile he'd given Seunghyun never leaves his face, and Seunghyun's left thinking that it's all quite the futile endeavour.

Because Seungri's already Seunghyun's favourite. That much hadn't, and won't ever change.

 

 

 

 

If Seunghyun had to pinpoint a specific time when things between him and Seungri had changed, it'd have been the car accident.

He remembers getting the call from Jiyong, watching the breaking news headline, and then not much else after that. His mind had been too fogged up with wine to retain much of anything else, which was the entire point of him drinking at the onset, so he guesses that it hadn't been a bad thing for him to forget.

It'd only been the next day, when he'd woken up to Seungri's call, hungover and face sticky with sweat, that he'd realized that maybe he'd done something terribly wrong in his lapse.

"Seungri-yah," Seunghyun had said, shooting up from his recline in bed to the severe displeasure of his crippling headache. "Are you alright? Are you safe?"

"I'm fine, hyung," Seungri had answered, sounding a bit tired and a whole lot of something else, but Seunghyun hadn't zeroed in on the something else because he'd been too relieved to hear Seungri's voice. He was alive, and he could still speak to Seunghyun, and that had been enough for Seunghyun to miss the irregularity. "Still kind of shaking, but I'm fine. I'm barely even hurt."

Barely hurt was still somewhat hurt, so Seunghyun had immediately started nagging in his worry. "If you're hurt, then you should be resting at the hospital, not talking to me. This kid, seriously, what does it take for you to stop fucking blabbering and start—"

"You're the one who called me," Seungri had blurted out, painfully loud in Seunghyun's alcohol-generated sensory sensitivity. Seunghyun had groaned in remonstration, and Seungri had heeded the noise by lowering his. "Sorry. You called me last night. You sounded drunk."

"I was," Seunghyun had confirmed, and left it at that. Seungri might have been dense to the depth of Seunghyun's true feelings, but he wasn't bad enough to doubt that Seunghyun cared about his well-being, to the point where he'd drink himself to liver failure at his death-scare, not that Seunghyun wasn't already doing that without the particular trigger anyways. "What did I say?"

Seunghyun had heard Seungri breathe in sharply. "What?"

"What did I say to you?" Seunghyun had repeated stiltedly, as if instructing a child. Seungri had just come out of an accident—alive, Seunghyun had reverberated in his head, thank  _god_ —so he'd cut him some slack. "You're calling me the morning after your accident when you should be resting, so I must've said something to you that needed addressing that I can't remember, because I was blackout drunk. What was it?"

Seungri had faltered. Even through the phone, Seunghyun had picked up on it, because Seungri always had something to say 9.8 times out of 10, and that moment had been the 0.2 that Seungri didn't. "Nothing, hyung. You just asked me if I was okay."

Seunghyun had frowned, not trusting Seungri's word for one second. "Jiyong already texted me that when he'd told me that you got into an accident. I wouldn't have just asked you that."

Seungri had laughed, but it'd been devoid of any joviality. "How would you know? You were blackout drunk."

"Are you telling me off, maknae?" Seunghyun had said, just to revamp the conversation, because hearing Seungri talk and laugh like that, like there'd been no conviction left in him, was just plain wrong. "Just because I say something doesn't mean you can say it back to me, you know. I'm your hyung. You want me to out you again on our next interview?"

"I know, I know," Seungri had yielded, before clicking his tongue and saying, "Listen, the doctor just came in. I'll talk to you when we fly to Singapore, okay?"

"Don't force yourself to work, Jesus," Seunghyun had seethed, because Seungri was so stubborn even when it came to his own health. "Focus on getting better first. I'll emcee in your place if anything."

"Don't, or I'd really be out of a job," Seungri had directed, sounding sunnier by the minute, with every word said. Seunghyun had closed his eyes, relief washing all over him. "You can't even speak Mandarin. All you'll do is stare the audience down with your alien contact lenses, and you'd still end up one-upping me."

"It's one job out of the seventy you have," Seunghyun had snorted, before lying back down on his mattress and cozying deep into his pillow. "Recover soon, alright? Daesung gets annoyed easily when you're not around. It  _ain't no fun, ain't no fun, ain't no fun_ —"

Seungri had sniggered at Seunghyun's segue into song. He'd always liked that one, he'd told Seunghyun, naked and knotted around Seunghyun in bed after their Alive showcase, thought it was the most fun to perform despite the title and lyrics, and that he'd liked how Seunghyun had sounded on the track. "That's because he has to take all the flak I usually do as the next youngest. But I'm sure you'll both live."

Seunghyun hadn't been sure, that previous night, but that morning, listening to Seungri after he'd thought about the possibility of losing him, he had been: he couldn't. Not without Seungri, even if he wasn't really Seunghyun's to lose. "I'm sure we will."

"See you soon, hyung," Seungri had said before hanging up, and Seunghyun had taken it as a promise.

Like Seunghyun had ordered—or Seungri's doctor did, but Seunghyun had liked to think that he had at least some degree of control over Seungri's decisions—Seungri had skipped Singapore, but then was back for Incheon, only for him to collapse in the middle of rehearsals from his high-grade fever, and Seunghyun had reverted to craving wine throughout the duration of their performance, or possibly even something harder.

"He'll be okay," Jiyong had said after, trying to comfort Seunghyun backstage, but even he'd been terrified. He'd already smoked six cigarettes to Seunghyun's nine in a span of forty-five minutes, so Seunghyun knew he was just as troubled by the image of Seungri's pale, lifeless face, falling headfirst onto the stage when he'd fainted. "Seungri's a fighter. This is nothing to him. He's already faced me."

For a moment, Seunghyun had been enraged. Trust Jiyong to take advantage of Seungri's unrequited feelings for him just to make a point, like the unrepentant bastard he is, but Jiyong had looked so solemn, so full of regret, that Seunghyun's anger had quickly dissipated. Jiyong had loved Seungri so much—in the ways that he could, the ways that he was allowed—and it hadn't been his fault that it wasn't the way that Seungri wanted Jiyong to love him back.

Seunghyun had never really understood it until then, watching Jiyong try to smother a sob as he'd asked for another cigarette, and Seunghyun had felt so sorry for him that he'd just handed him the last one in his pack, sacrificing himself to the cause just that tiny bit more.

But Jiyong had been right, because Jiyong was always right: Seungri had been okay, after recuperating in the hospital, getting a bunch of fluids and pain meds pushed into him. Seunghyun had snuck in a visit, despite his manager's honking about time and cancelled schedules and tarnished reputations, because Seunghyun never did anything he didn't want to do, and all he did want was to check if Seungri really had been okay.

"Seunghyun-hyung," Seungri had said, eyes hooded and voice groggy from the analgesics, but his surprise had still been conveyed. "What're you doing here?"

"Getting a vitamin drip," Seunghyun had answered sarcastically, laughing at how Seungri had tried to add it all up in his head and how it clearly played out on his face. "Obviously to check on you, my maknae. I wanted to see if they'd finally managed to drug you into muteness."

"Haha," Seungri had drolled, giving Seunghyun a tepid glare, and Seunghyun had stepped up to his bedside and fed the urge to brush the hair matting on Seungri's forehead away. "Don't you have to go promote a film, or something?"

"Why would I, when I could just sit here and film you?" Seunghyun had said, pulling out his phone from the inside pocket of his coat to open his camera. "The greatest film of all time. Tarantino's shaking in his boots."

"Stop," Seungri had said weakly, but his mouth had quaked from repressing his smile. Seunghyun had made sure to take a shot, or two, or twenty. "Tarantino sucks, anyways."

"So you're a film connoisseur now, too?" Seunghyun had arched his brows, sat on the edge of Seungri's bed, being careful not to block any of his IV tubes. "Why wasn't I informed when you'd picked that trash movie about—"

"It was romantic, alright?" Seungri had defended, not even letting Seunghyun finish, but it'd been so sluggish of an utterance that it'd lost any vestiges of compulsion. "Girl likes guy, guy likes someone else who doesn't like him back, girl struggles in silence until guy finally notices her and loves her back," Seungri had paused to let out a pathetic little cough, before continuing, "Now that's what I call cinematic art."

That's what Seunghyun would have called reel resembling real, but he'd already spent too long being pathetic himself, so he hadn't even batted an eyelash when Seungri had picked that one from the hotel pay-per-view for concert movie night, while the other members had cried the most ardent of fouls. "Romance is dead, Seungri-yah, or didn't you know?"

"Then why are you here?" Seungri had asked, and Seunghyun had looked down so fast that he could feel the whiplash even five weeks after the fact. "If romance is dead, why are you visiting me?"

If Seunghyun hadn't been turned immobile by the line of questioning, then he surely would've pulled the alarm overhead for a cardiac code. "I'm not here to romance you," he'd said instead, throat tight and pulse stuttering out of whack. "I'm just making sure you're alive."

Seungri had smiled, small but grim, implicative. "You care so much," he'd said to Seunghyun, a sleepy whoosh of air, and Seunghyun had felt like his heart actually  _had_  seized. "Too much. It hurts when you do that."

Seunghyun hadn't known what to say. "Seungri—"

"It hurts," Seungri had mumbled, like he really was in pain, but Seunghyun didn't think it'd had anything to do with the complications of his accident. "You care so much, and it hurts, because I don't know if I can care as much as that." Seungri's eyes had shut, but Seunghyun had thought he'd caught them watering before they did. "I feel burdened. I don't want to be a burden anymore, hyung."

"You're not," Seunghyun had said, all he really could say. It wasn't the way Seunghyun had wanted Seungri to find out. Seunghyun had never wanted Seungri to find out, but just like he always did, he'd underestimated Seungri's resourcefulness, his ability to land on the right conclusions by himself. "I'm not—I'm not asking for anything from you, Seungri. I just want you to get better."

"Not now," Seungri had said, near whimpering. "You're not asking for anything now, but later, you will. Everyone always does. And I won't be able to give you anything back, just like—" Seungri had stopped there, but Seunghyun had already known where he was going.  _Just like Jiyong can't give me anything back_. "It doesn't matter. I can't do it, hyung...I can't..."

"Seungri," Seunghyun had said, holding onto both of his hands beseechingly, but Seungri'd already fallen asleep, and the nurse had entered the room to tell him that visiting hours had been over even before he'd come in, and she'd just let him go because he was T.O.P, but her charge nurse had already told her off about it, so Choi Seunghyun-ssi would have to leave or even he'd be taken away by security.

"Come on, Seunghyun," his manager had said, poking his head into Seungri's room, mouthing an  _I told you so_  behind the bumbling nurse. "You'll be late for your flight."

So Seunghyun had let go, let his manager usher him out of the hospital and into his airport vehicle, let his brain operate on autopilot and dismissed any thought of Seungri.

The next time Seunghyun had thought about Seungri was the next time he'd seen him, at another innumerable fan meeting where he'd briefly talked about his accident and his hospitalization and how blessed he was that D-LITE-san and Sol-san had paid him a visit but that he ultimately understood that GD-san and T.O.P-san couldn't back out of their other commitments so it was no big deal that they didn't.

Seunghyun had just arranged his face into stoic indifference at the lie as Seungri had carried on to thank all the VIPs for their love and support. He'd already spent weeks acting like that visit hadn't happened, so why stop then? Why get mad that Seungri seemed to want to pretend that he didn't remember, either?

It hadn't truly bugged him until they'd gone back in to their debriefing room and he saw Seungri try to talk to everyone, member and staff alike, except him. Seungri hadn't been just pretending not to remember him anymore; he was actually avoiding his existence entirely.

"Why did you lie?" Seunghyun had asked, when he got the chance to corner Seungri as he'd taken a break from schmoozing and distracted himself with his phone. "What's this all about?"

Youngbae, who'd been busy non-stop texting Hyorin beside Seungri, had caught on to Seunghyun's latter demand and looked up at him with wariness in his gaze, as if Seunghyun would dare push Seungri too far just after recovering. "Let's not fight, now."

"Not fighting," Seunghyun had said, pure saccharine, squeezed himself in the couch space between Youngbae and Seungri, and Seunghyun had felt Seungri's legs tense from the close proximity, and how Seungri had tried to pull away when Seunghyun had snatched up his hand. "Just catching up on a little hyung-maknae bonding time."

"Okay," Youngbae had said, extending each syllable, but he'd looked mollified, had stood up to let Seunghyun sit more properly and drifted towards Daesung on the other side of the room, not without saying, "Don't break him when we'd just gotten him back, though."

Seunghyun had wanted to laugh, but thought about how terrorized Youngbae would be by the wretchedness of the sound, so he hadn't, but he'd still thought it fucking hilarious: however many years ago, he'd told Jiyong the same thing, near verbatim, and somehow it'd been Seunghyun to end up disfigured.

"I won't," Seunghyun had called out instead, because how could you break someone who didn't want to be held? "Maknae's safe with me."

Seungri hadn't looked safe; he'd looked like Seunghyun had been just another accident waiting to happen. "Seunghyun-hyung—"

"Oh, so you do still know who I am," Seunghyun had mocked pointedly, and it had given him satisfaction to see Seungri wince. "You're done pretending not to know me? I'm not just T.O.P-san anymore?"

"I wasn't pretending to do anything," Seungri had said, wrenching his fingers one-by-one out of Seunghyun's restrictive grip. "And I didn't lie. I don't even know what I'd said that I'd be lying about."

"You're lying right now," Seunghyun had said stringently, his patience having been worn thin over the weeks after that hospital visit without his full consciousness. "I visited you, when you were still confined—"

"Did you?" Seungri had said, irreverent, and Seunghyun had to admit it was a solid act, except for the part where Seungri couldn't keep looking at him for more than two blinks. "Well, I don't remember. I must've been asleep."

"Seungri," Seunghyun had said, and it hadn't been angry; it'd been plaintive, desperate, and Seunghyun had wanted to rip his own tongue out to prevent any other noise from escaping, but he couldn't stop himself from speaking. "If you're worried about what happened—"

"Nothing happened!" Seungri had tittered, volume high enough to get the surrounding staff members to look their way, and Seungri had clapped his hands together penitently before turning back to look at Seunghyun. "I'm sorry I was asleep when you visited, hyung. I'm thankful that you took time off your busy schedule to look after me, but I'm okay now, so you don't need to keep hovering over me."

It was difficult to argue with Seungri when he'd already made his mind up about something, so Seunghyun hadn't even tried. He'd just let Seungri walk away towards Jiyong, let him be drawn in under Jiyong's arm, let Jiyong's kiss be pressed to his cheek, and let him hurt Seunghyun as he'd proceeded to ignore him for the rest of the day.

Or the rest of the year, and the first two months of the year after that. Outside of on-stage and on-camera interactions and contractual obligations, Seungri had stopped talking to him. Even when Jiyong had started getting serious with his new girlfriend, Seungri hadn't sought him out for an easy, escapist fuck, and Seunghyun hadn't offered because he'd finally reached the boiling point of being constantly rejected, of always coming second-place.

That's what he'd thought, and for a while, it had stuck. But then MADE happened, and preparations had gone underway, and Seungri had dyed his hair fucking  _blond_ , and all Seunghyun had kept seeing was Seungri's eyes and Seungri's skin and Seungri's dazzling goddamn smile, and Seunghyun had reframed his thought back to the old guard and swore that he wouldn't have asked for anything more if he could just have all of those back.

Secretly filming him had been his way of doing just that. Any time he was around Seungri, his camera was on: in the dressing rooms, on the plane. In the showers. Seunghyun had been tempted by all that flesh on display, but he'd held himself back. Seungri's  _no_  had been irrefutable, would only be more definitive if he'd actually verbalized it, and Seunghyun could still respect his boundaries even if it killed him to be that jetlagged, so close and yet still continents apart.

Some boundaries. Because it's as if the shower had reawakened something in Seungri, even if he hadn't woken up the same: he'd chased Seunghyun around the dressing room and grouched at him to delete the video and even went as far as to try and wrestle the phone out of Seunghyun's hand, the first time he'd initiated ample touch with Seunghyun in almost a year, and Seunghyun had been so extensively deprived that the transient intervals when Seungri would press the length of his body against Seunghyun's had felt as close to fulfilled as he'd ever get.

"That's too much," Seungri had erupted, surging into Seunghyun's hotel room without an invite, and Seunghyun had closed the door behind him with his heart in his throat and his dick already in Seungri's hand. "Even for you, that's too much."

"Seungri," Seunghyun had choked out, wrecked and overjoyed and so close to coming just by being held in Seungri's fist without even moving. "Seungri—"

"Shut up," Seungri had said, harsh, unforgiving, constricting his grip just as, "If we're going to do this, then you have to shut up. Just don't talk. Okay?"

Seunghyun would have ceded anything at that point, but the crack in Seungri's voice, the look on his face, like maybe he was just as wrecked as Seunghyun had been about their separation, would have made Seunghyun cede  _everything_. 

So Seunghyun had said, "Okay," kissed the quiver out of Seungri's lips, and he'd laid himself face down on the bed and let Seungri fuck him for the first time since they'd started spinning whatever spider's web they'd finally found themselves trapped at the epicentre in.

"I can't give you what you want," Seungri had said mournfully, after he'd come on Seunghyun's back and brought Seunghyun off in his hand, and all the aggression of before had suddenly seemed like a child soldier donning the silver-plated armour of a man just so he could get a fighting chance at a battle that he won't ever be able to beat. "This isn't—I'm not—"

"Shut up," Seunghyun had shot back, only containing half of Seungri's earlier heat, had mouthed his next words onto the back of Seungri's ear as he'd pulled him flat against his chest. "I don't care. I don't even know what I want, so stop worrying." And Seunghyun had been better off not knowing.

When Seunghyun had woken up in the morning, the side of the bed that Seungri had slept on the previous evening had been empty. Seunghyun had ran a hand over the cold sheets feeling more hollow than he'd expected, and more than he had the right to be.

That'd been the last time Seungri had let Seunghyun hold him that closely, even as they'd resumed fucking, but Seunghyun still remembers starkly how Seungri had moulded into him like their bodies were crafted for each other, like they had been made to be a perfect fit.

 

 

 

 

Dinner goes better than expected, which is worse than what Seunghyun wanted, because it becomes harder to erase Seungri from the fantasy of what would be waiting for Seunghyun once he comes out of the military.

By the end of the night, his mom's a quarter in love with Seungri, Yeonjun two-quarters more, and Hyeyoun's just impregnable because she already has a hot husband waiting at home, but Seunghyun also has a sneaking suspicion that she  _knows_ , because when Seunghyun hadn't been busy catching himself staring at Seungri, he'd been busy catching Hyeyoun staring at him.

"Stay safe, brother," Hyeyoun tells him, rifling a hand through Seunghyun's scalp as she hugs him goodbye and yanking ruthlessly at the strands of hair she could still grip. "I love you. And if you have any love left to spare someone who's not Seungri, please learn to give it to yourself."

See, Seunghyun gets more things right now than he does wrong, which in itself is another correct assertion. Score. "I already do love myself."

"I highly doubt that," Hyeyoun says, looks at Seungri askance, supercilious, as he roams aimlessly around his living room answering what seems to be a long-distance phone call from China. "But the heart wants what it wants. At least he's hot."

Seunghyun looks over at Seungri himself, spots him with his head tilted away from the mirror and holding a nostril up, using the glow from his phone as a modified otoscope, and Seunghyun just laughs because even when Seungri's like that, too fucking goofy to be hot, he's still what Seunghyun's heart wants. "He has his moments."

"He was mostly all hot today, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt," Hyeyoun decrees, and tiptoes up to place a last kiss onto Seunghyun's forehead. "Love you, Seunghyun."

"Love you," he returns, presses his lips elongatedly against Yeonjun's lolling head, conked out in Hyeyoun's arms. "Love you too, Yeonjunnie."

His mom comes next, saving the best for last. "Seunghyun-ah."

"Eomma," Seunghyun sing-songs, cuddling into his mom's neck like Yeonjun did to Hyeyoun, and this is what he considers to be home, or maybe just a facet of it. "The best eomma ever."

"You sure are full of love today," his mom says blithely, and Seunghyun isn't surprised to hear the knowing tune to her voice, because the women in Seunghyun's life all somehow knew things before he was ready to admit to it himself. Feminism, right? "Seungri's a nice boy."

"He's alright," Seunghyun says, guarded, but he can't ever hide anything from his mom, and the wine had made him porous enough that the endearment had percolated itself into his speech. "A serviceable maknae."

"Seunghyun," his mom berates, and just like with Youngbae, Seunghyun just grins, like his propensity for rudeness isn't something he could realistically change, so people might as well get used to it. "Being older doesn't mean you get to be disrespectful."

"Yes, eomma," Seunghyun nods filially, enveloping her in a hug. "I'll treat him better, if that's what you want."

"I want you to be happy," his mom says frankly, and that rings louder than any reprehension she could ever dole out. "Things might be hard right now, but everything will work out in the end, you'll see. In the meantime, just do whatever makes you happy."

What makes Seunghyun happy is exactly what makes things so hard, Seunghyun doesn't say, because he doesn't want to sadden his mom any further, and a sad mom is worse than a disappointed mom which is worse than all of the angry moms in the world put together. "Alright."

"Bye, honey," his mom says, hugging back with more vigour than an aging woman should have before letting go, "I'll see you at the entrance ceremony. Tell Seungri I said bye again, and to take care of himself."

And it's back to just him and Seungri, alone again. Seunghyun pads over to the dining room to pile up the used dishes, racks them into his dishwasher and turns it on at optimum setting. He's already stored away their leftovers by the time Seungri wraps up his call, and the wine he's picked out for them to drink has started condensating as Seungri walks back into the kitchen. "Sorry about that. There's some problems with the ramen store launch in Shanghai, and I'm running close to the deadline."

That makes two of them. "Lee-sajang's so busy," Seunghyun says, pats at the vacant seat beside him and sets a wine glass in front of the phantom entity for Seungri to take over. "Have a drink. One last wine bottle with hyung before he joins the army."

"You're having dinner with all of us the night before, though," Seungri says, narrowing his eyes incisively at Seunghyun, but he tips his glass by the neck to let Seunghyun fill it halfway. "Jiyong-hyung won't let you get away without seeing us."

"And Jiyongie always gets what he wants, right?" Seunghyun posits, but Seungri doesn't react. It doesn't matter; Seunghyun's going to have this whether Jiyong's in the picture or not. "Forget Jiyong, this is what  _I_ want tonight. Just the two of us. Seungdeuli."

Seungri keeps mum, just passively toasts Seunghyun's glass as Seunghyun zooms them together, sips his wine leisurely while Seunghyun chugs his.

When he does speak, it's so quiet that it's like he hadn't even spoken at all. "You drink too much, you know."

As if to prove him right, Seunghyun refills his glass and rapidly chugs that down too. "Daesung told me. And Daesung told me that you told him, and probably everyone but me. So I do, thank you."

Seungri frowns disapprovingly, but his ears turn pink. "I wasn't trying to skirt it around you. I just thought you'd take it the wrong way, considering how—"

"Daesung told me that, too," Seunghyun interrupts, not really wanting to hear how that ends, already knows—how volatile he's been? How much of a basketcase conscription has turned him into?—so he pours himself more wine instead, but Seungri holds a hand over his and guides the bottle and Seunghyun's arm both to set the base back down on the wooden table.

"Stop," Seungri says, louder, more like the Seungri everyone knows, but there's a plea to his voice that even Seunghyun doesn't know, hasn't heard in a long while. "Can you not—can you not be drunk tonight? I want to talk to you like an actual person rather than a corpse in rigor mortis before you leave."

"Riga-what?" Seunghyun laughs, trying to wriggle his fingers underneath Seungri's to belie their shaking, but Seungri just continues to cover them resolutely. "Stop talking down on me, maknae. Hyung already knows he's stupid."

"Would you stop saying things like that?" Seungri vents, finally yanking his fingers off of Seunghyun's as if burnt, and Seunghyun feels the magnitude of its singe on the back of his hand. "You're not stupid, you're not going to die alone, lots of people love you and they'd kill for you to see that they do—"

"What people?" Seunghyun kindles, ready to dispute. There are loads of people who love him, both shallow and profound, but that's not the problem here; the problem is there's only one person he wants love from, and that person wants love from someone else. "The fans? My mom? My friends? Which of them would kill to see me get the love I want?"

Seungri goes quiet, not looking at Seunghyun, and Seunghyun finds no resistance when he moves to drink straight from the mouth of the bottle itself. "All of them, hyung."

"Even you?" Seunghyun dares, raising an eyebrow, and Seungri still doesn't look. Seunghyun takes another swig of his wine, a household brand, but he can't remember it ever tasting this bitter. "Ah. And all this time I'd assumed it was only Jiyong who was capable of being so cruel."

But Seungri doesn't appear shame-faced, nor does he appear guilt-stricken; he looks positively livid, dangerous. "You do that a lot, too. Assume."

"Can't do anything else when you don't have the facts," Seunghyun shrugs, and Seungri finally snaps his head towards him, face oriented to how Seunghyun would imagine his own face to look if anyone would insult his mother. "Incidentally, I do have the unfortunate facts, so who's to say I'm assuming, hm?"

"No you don't," Seungri barks, more biting than the last. "You don't have it, because you never even fucking ask."

Seunghyun's lucky he isn't drinking from a wide-brim glass, because he would've snorted all the wine in from how hard he laughs. Here's him ruing all the vacuous things he'd said three years back, and Seungri doesn't even  _remember_. "I did ask. You said no. And even when I didn't ask, you'd still said no. That's already two facts, done and dusted."

Seungri clacks his mouth shut, as if the memory's finally come in whole, but he looks away from Seunghyun once more. Oh, Seunghyun thinks acerbically, the transparency. "Well, then you should ask again."

"Why? So you can tell me no one more time? So you can show me how much more Jiyong can monopolize you now that I'm gone?" Seunghyun laughs again, more acrid, less humourous. Seungri really had become cruel, Jiyong as his role model, but this is different; this is the pupil beating the master, being needlessly callous. "I'm going out for a smoke. Don't follow me if you're just going to spout off the same ugly bullshit you're saying now."

Seunghyun steps out onto his balcony and fumbles for a cigarette, dropping two on the tiles from how bad he's trembling and almost burning the tips of his fingers with his shoddy lighter. He smokes one to the butt, the second close to done, and he momentarily thinks about going back inside before grabbing his third, realizing that Seungri had probably already gone home from the wait and hating the fact that he was once again stuck in this unbearably large house and still so fucking alone.

But the door opens, the chime of his security system tinkling in the background, and Seunghyun closes his eyes, tired from the intermittence of hope. "Unless you'd picked up a smoking habit over the last twenty minutes or so, you shouldn't be out here. Wouldn't want the baby maknae to suffocate."

"Loving Jiyong is already suffocating," Seungri says, tentative, as he walks to stand beside Seunghyun, and Seunghyun just exhales harrowingly around his cigarette. All roads lead back to Jiyong; Seunghyun might as well stop trying to escape the maze.

"Aren't we all so lucky that you like being choked, then?" Seunghyun jeers, blows a half-drag of smoke Seungri's way that Seungri doesn't even cough at. What a waste. "Or is it always just the other way around? Is asphyxiation just a straight-sex thing with you?"

"That's not it," Seungri says caustically, spinning on his heels to look up fully at Seunghyun, so Seunghyun turns to him just as gamely. "It's not—it's not even ever about the choking to me. It's a better fucking high, fine, but that's not what I look forward to the most when I do that." 

"Oh?" Now even Seunghyun's knees are wobbling. He leans an elbow against his railing, tries to play it off as some majestic photoshoot pose like he's prone to do rather than the fall-risk prevention it actually is. "So what is it? The cute collars? You always did have a fetish for accessories."

Seungri doesn't glare, eyes not even twitching. They hold that same indecipherable quality they'd had, back at the hotel lobby in Fukuoka, but now Seunghyun recognizes what it is, and maybe it's the oxymoronic mind's clarity that alcohol can sometimes bring or the layer of moonlight potentiating their sheen, or maybe Seunghyun's really just become delusional counting down closer to his leave, because it almost looks—almost seems like—

It almost seems like the same gleam Seungri would get whenever he's gazing at Jiyong.

"Breathing," Seungri says, with concrete surety, and Seunghyun forgets how to do exactly that. "At the end, when someone lets go—I can breathe. Being suffocated's exhilarating, sometimes, but it doesn't ever beat knowing that I'm still alive."

Seunghyun's heart thuds so hard beneath his ribcage, he feels like all he can hear is the sound of muscle hitting bone. "Loving Jiyong is suffocating?"

"Loving Jiyong is suffocating, and I'm done with wanting to feel suffocated," Seungri accedes, nodding, and he doesn't look away. He doesn't look away, and his eyes are still the same, and Seunghyun's fingers scorch from the fire reaching the end of his cigarette but he doesn't even feel the pain. "But loving you—it feels like breathing."

Seungri loves him. Seungri is what Seunghyun wants, has always wanted, and Seungri's finally giving back. Seungri loves him, and loves him, and loves him—

—and Seunghyun fucking  _laughs_. "I can't believe—fuck, I'm genuinely going to—telling me all of this through a fucking allegory to a fucking  _sex kink_ , fuck—"

"I knew you wouldn't take this seriously," Seungri says, witheringly cold, but his face shutters off and he looks so indescribably  _young_  and Seunghyun just cackles even louder. "You never—I shouldn't have even said anything, you're so fucking—"

Seunghyun rounds in on him before he can move away, swivels his hips forward so that he's pressing them against Seungri's and pinning him perniciously close to toppling off the railing. "I'm halfway into a fucking panic attack because of you, but I'm still taking you seriously." He lets his cigarette fall from his fingers and onto the cobblestone priming, freeing them completely to card along Seungri's nape, the flat of his thumb caressing wondrously down the line of Seungri's jaw.  _Seunghyun's_  jaw, too, now that Seungri's finally relinquishing control of it, _him_. "Don't you remember?  _I_ take you seriously. I always take you seriously."

Seungri's mouth is still set into a scowl, but his overall expression relaxes to one of relief. "That's not what you said the last time."

That's not enough detail to go by for a total recall, but Seunghyun still remembers. He can forget dance moves and Japanese lyrics and scheduled plans with friends, but Seunghyun would remember everything, as long as it comes to Seungri.

"I'd  _just_  finished a panic attack back then. Also partially because of you," Seunghyun says, not really meaning to blame, but Seungri just rolls his eyes anyways, so Seunghyun knows it's okay. "Forgive me."

"Should you really be the one apologizing?" Seungri asks, face warping into compunction as he nuzzles it into Seunghyun's hand, but Seunghyun won't hold grudges now that he can hold Seungri instead. "You're right, I'm cruel. I knew, but I still came back to you. I'm sorry."

"Since when?" is Seunghyun's answer and question, even though he already knows, and what he's really asking for is  _how?_  

"My accident," Seungri says, voice soft, as if he's talking about a fond memory and not the traumatic event it had been. Seunghyun's stomach lurches at the dour reminder, but his chest bubbles up giddily at the thought that it's not just him who remembers. "The night of. You called me, and you were drunk, and you left me a couple of voicemails. You told me everything."

It definitely sounds like something Seunghyun would do under the influence, and also under extreme duress. "And you called me the next day."

"Yeah," Seungri says, giggling warmly, and Seunghyun doesn't know how much more his heart can soar. "I wanted to ask if you'd meant it, but you didn't even remember, so I just thought it was because you were worried I'd almost died and dropped it."

So maybe there are  _some_  things about Seungri that Seunghyun doesn't remember. More valid reason to quit drinking alcohol that Seunghyun won't ever follow through on, but Seungri's got him covered. "I meant it. Whatever it is I said, I meant all of it."

"I know," Seungri says, tilting his face up to smile at Seunghyun, and Seunghyun wants to embed the curve onto his own lips but he wants to hear Seungri's voice—tender, earnest,  _loving_ —even more. "When you visited me in the hospital, I knew you were serious."

And the rest is history, so Seunghyun will leave it in the past. "I'm still serious now."

"Okay, thanks, I get it," Seungri says lackadaisically, grin gone back to its standard impishness, and the impulse to kiss him just snowballs until Seunghyun's breaching the last bit of space between them and covering Seungri's mouth with his.

Seunghyun almost wishes he hadn't smoked that third cigarette, doesn't want Seungri to taste all that ash, but Seungri doesn't pull away in repugnance like he usually does, even delves his tongue past Seunghyun's lips first rather than the other way around, and Seunghyun stops wishing because there's nothing more he wants to be granted other than  _this_.

"Aren't you gonna ask me when I'd started to love you back?" Seungri husks out, when Seunghyun nips at his lower lip to inaugurate his descent towards his neck. "Don't you wanna know whatever weirdness you did that made me want you?"

"Does it matter?" Seunghyun murmurs, scraping his teeth against Seungri's collarbone and eliciting a gasp. "I already got the BDSM equivalence of a love confession. Nothing can ever top that."

Seungri whines above him, both from annoyance and the feel of Seunghyun's hips rocking sharply into his. "You're always gonna hold that over my head from now on, huh?"

"Yes," Seunghyun says, no hesitation, and when Seungri gyrates reciprocally up against him with higher force and frequency, Seunghyun doesn't hesitate to pull Seungri back into his apartment so he can start undressing him, either. "I'm telling everyone how you brought romance back into the world with a single inappropriate metaphor about choking and—"

"Will you shut the fuck up?" Seungri says, obviously trying to be intimidating but coming out more risible when the oversized sleeve of his shirt gets stuck around his neck like a noose. Seunghyun laughs uninhibitedly at the irony, to which Seungri throws the discarded piece of clothing smack dab on his face, an errant button hitting Seunghyun's brow bone as his karma. "You're always running your mouth. I couldn't even get a word in edgewise beforehand, so I had to get creative."

That's rich, coming from the biggest chatterbox in South Korea, and possibly across the entire Eastern hemisphere, but Seunghyun relents, lets Seungri have his time to talk shit, because Seunghyun's already got his; everything he needs, draped beneath the palms of his hands, Seungri flushed along his bed and bathed in vertical stripes of moonlight through the shutters on his window, looking like the best bit of art that Seunghyun's ever curated, the missing piece to turn a house into a home.

"And the voicemails," Seungri continues, and Seunghyun would shove his fingers into Seungri's mouth for him to suck and shut up, but Seunghyun lets him speak and sucks them on his own, likes the way Seungri's words hitch as he raptly watches Seunghyun more than he does him not speaking at all. "I take it back—you should apologize for those—Seunghyun,  _Jesus_ —"

Seunghyun has his hand coiled around the base of Seungri's cock, wet from his saliva and the dribble of pre-come that's already spurting out of Seungri's slit—always so overexcited, always so  _easy_ —

"You fucker," Seungri mewls, desperate, just the tip of Seunghyun's thumb sliding a little past the pucker of Seungri's hole, clenching around the digit like it wants to swallow it whole. "After that call, I couldn't—I couldn't sleep with anyone without thinking of you, how I'd be fucking them and still just end up wanting—just wanting—"

"Wanting what?" Seunghyun goads, slips the rest of his thumb in up to the knuckle, tracing the familiar path of where to uproot Seungri's control. Seungri hisses from the sting, but Seunghyun keeps on, because if there's one thing Seunghyun's learned throughout all the years of him trying to teach himself a lesson in the art of letting go, it's that Seungri, just like Seunghyun, doesn't enjoy anything as much unless it hurts. "What do you want?"

"You," Seungri whimpers, and nothing has changed; it's Seunghyun who's still the one easy for Seungri, still the one who comes undone from a look, still the one who claws and scratches at Seungri's skin just so he can hold onto the last shred of sanity that loving Seungri can afford, "You, Seunghyun—all of you, now,  _fuck_ —"

Seungri already has all of Seunghyun, but Seunghyun's always, always willing to give him more; yanks his bedside drawer out of its shelving to rifle frantically at the lube and condoms hidden in the back, slicks himself up to the creases of his legs and coats his hand to plunge two fingers deep into Seungri while he's cock-deep in Seunghyun's mouth, bucking up hard enough to punch out Seunghyun's breaths but Seunghyun doesn't care—all he cares about is the way Seungri's toes curl into the skin on Seunghyun's back, the way his hips stutter out the decomposure his words never do, the way he cries out in perfect, strangled sobs of Seunghyun's name and leaves no room for doubt that Seungri could be thinking about anything else but right here, right now, Seunghyun letting him bruise his throat, filling him up to four, pushing him to the stars to give him enough leeway to fall.

"Please," Seungri  _begs_ , and it's almost like coming full circle, Seungri searching for something he won't ever find and Seunghyun's weakness for restoring what's ruined, except now Seunghyun knows that the things you don't specifically look for have a way of fixing even what hasn't yet been broken. "In me, hyung,  _please_ —" 

Seunghyun pulls off, his lips sore and his tongue hot and the string of spit still connecting them sloppily beautiful, aligns the head of his cock carefully against the tender flesh of Seungri's entrance before sinking in all at once, the synchronicity of their moans as sweet as harmony for the unlikeliest of songs.

"More," Seungri keens, and Seunghyun folds; "More," Seungri lilts, and Seunghyun groans; "More," Seungri chokes, breath tapering off, and Seunghyun kisses him deep and hard and open like he's giving life support.

"Touch me," Seungri orders, directing Seunghyun's hand back impatiently to his neglected, leaking cock. Seunghyun strokes him as briskly as his own thrusting goes, but Seungri snaps his hips up harder and harder until Seunghyun's not too sure exactly who's still fucking who. "I'm gonna— _Seunghyun_ —"

Seungri reaches his peak and tightens around every last surface of Seunghyun's cock as he comes, and Seunghyun relishes in the taut heat for as long as he can before it gets too much, too soon, Seungri kissing him slowly, thoroughly, as Seunghyun wracks in the convulsions of his orgasm, licks into Seunghyun's pleasure-parted mouth like all the time in the world will balance itself out just for them, so that Seunghyun can slump down spent against the length of Seungri's body and be held just as much as he wants to hold.

"Wait for me," Seunghyun says, before he can even be sure that his voice still works, half of the request buried in the crook of Seungri's neck when Seunghyun realizes how piteous he'd truly become, how much dignity he's lost, how neither of those matter just as long as Seunghyun can leave knowing that Seungri will be there when he returns.

But Seungri gently tugs Seunghyun's head back up by his hair, looks his whole face over as if weighing his options, and then he smiles, and it's the most radiant thing Seunghyun's ever experienced, aside from hearing Seungri's following words, "For as long as you've waited. Even more than that."

Only Seungri can make that sound like a long distance competition rather than a vow of lifelong commitment, but that's how Seunghyun's certain that Seungri means it. "And Jiyong—"

"Will be right here waiting with me, just like Youngbae and Daesung," Seungri says, with finality Seunghyun can't help but hoard away to plaster over the pang of homesickness that's already growing in his chest. "Jiyong will be Jiyong, and I'll be who I am. And who I am doesn't want Jiyong anymore." Seungri reaches his other hand up in between them to shag at Seunghyun's trimmed fringe affectionately, the side of his face tingling where Seungri unhurriedly runs his fingers downwards. "I'm a busy man. There's not enough slots in my calendar to pencil in wanting someone else. Unless you want to cancel an appointment...?"

Seunghyun snorts at the lameness of the joke, but his fear dwindles down exponentially to make way for a rise in fervent devotion. "I don't."

"You better not," Seungri says, smirking, the kind that says Seunghyun's in for some trouble. "Or I'll sue you. I still have your confession on record, so think twice before you change your mind and start fucking some cadet on the side who won't ever be half as hot as me."

"You can't sue me for not—" Seunghyun starts, realizes what Seungri's just said, and then props himself up with his elbows against the mattress to eyeball him to depth, "You kept them? The voicemails?"

Seungri's smirk is still in place, but it's less imposing now, more diffident, as if he's caught between wanting to be undaunted and not being able to do so, faking confidence the way Seungri's always done when the confidence he already did have in multitude still somehow came up short. "Yeah. I thought it'd be rude to delete them. It's just good manners."

"Manners," Seunghyun parrots dully, dismayed, but Seungri's eyelids start flapping uncontrollably, the way it does when he's flustered, so Seunghyun forges onward, striving for gold. "It's good manners for you to know all that time and not tell your hyung that you did?"

"You knew I knew," Seungri argues, chin crimping, his sudden jolt of movement as he does snagging Seunghyun's mostly out cock back inside him. They both breathe raggedly at the tactile overload, even as Seungri tries to keep on talking through it, "Is it good manners for you to tell me you love me over the phone, while you're hammered, after I'd just been on the brink of death?"

"Who said I had manners?" Seunghyun counters, rolling his hips in mildly, experimentally, to immediate effect: Seungri moans, eyes hooding, grips a hand on a pinch of skin at the back of Seunghyun's neck and bears down hard on Seunghyun's next lenient thrust. " _Fuck_ , Seungri, don't—"

"I deserve better than a drunken confession," Seungri says, winded, but through the lust in his eyes and the primal need in his voice, Seunghyun can still pick out that Seungri's genuinely upset over what he's saying. "I've been giving you all these chances to say it, and still all I get is—"

"I love you," Seunghyun says, cuts him off, drives into him faster, and faster, and faster, until he doesn't know what the fuck he's saying anymore, doesn't know if it's embarrassing or pathetic or downright mentally off, doesn't care in the slightest, nor does he plan to regret it right after, "I fucking love you, even after all these years—loved you for so long, so fucking much—miss you, always missing you—so much, I feel like I'll fucking die without having you for two years, and then you'll be gone for two more—don't want to leave you to Jiyong, don't want you with anyone else—I can't, I fucking  _can't_ —"

"Seunghyun," Seungri says, voice stable even as Seunghyun pounds into him, hands firm on either side of his face, locking their eyes together, inescapable, reeling Seunghyun back in, "I'm here, Seunghyun. I'll be here. I'm yours."

 _His_. And Seunghyun comes again, lets go, and this time he doesn't worry about what he's losing because he knows Seungri will just find his way back. 

"I love you," Seunghyun kisses onto Seungri's eyes, his nose, his lips, the words never running dry even as Seungri empties himself all over Seunghyun's hand. "I love you."

"Finally," is all Seungri grunts, shaking out the last of his aftershocks, but when Seunghyun pulls himself out and lies down beside Seungri in bed, Seungri retreats into his arms and lets Seunghyun draw him closer, touching chest to back to knees to calves, heart to heart at all points of contact and saying it back for him,  _I love you, too_.

The fit of them together, Seunghyun's arms snug around Seungri's waist as they fall quickly into slumber: that, Seunghyun thinks, is mending, more than the sum of their broken parts.

 _Finally_ , Seunghyun agrees, and goes to sleep feeling bizarrely back at peace. 

 

 

 

 

In the end, Jiyong still gets what he wants.

"Seunghyun-hyung," Jiyong bleats through his phone, at too fucking early o'clock, ruining the best sleep Seunghyun's had in, at minimum, the past four months, and at maximum, the last half-decade. "You're coming to dinner with us, or I'm kicking your door in. I'm not above doing a little property damage."

"Maybe if you stop whining about it, you won't need to," Seunghyun bats, but it's Seungri who lets out a small whine when Seunghyun resumes his position behind him, hooking his chin over Seungri's shoulder so that his speech is sandwiched in between his phone and Seungri's ear. "No one likes a whiner, Jiyongie."

Lying's become a bad habit: Seunghyun had liked Seungri's whine just now,  _loved_  all the whimpering he did last night, but since it's whiter than the rest of his lies, Seunghyun classifies it as relatively harmless.

"And yet you're in love with Seungri," Jiyong remarks, because being an asshole is his worst vice, but current extenuating context or not, Seunghyun's learned to accept it for its truth, one lesson out of many that's pending.

But he has time. With Seungri, time's all but an illusion, anyways, or something corny people who finally have their love requited say like that. Seunghyun's well acquainted with self-derision, so calling a spade a spade isn't much to cow at even if it is at his expense.

"There's really no accounting for taste," Seunghyun shrugs sagely, and the inward movement of his shoulders releases another sound of complaint from somewhere in the back of Seungri's throat.

"The fuck?" Jiyong clucks like a morning rooster, decibel levels high enough to wake dogs, or the dead. "Was that Seungri just now? He's seen you and didn't tell us about it?"

In answer, Seunghyun tries to put on his best I'm-a-serious-actor-at-an-equally-serious-press-conference voice. "I can neither confirm nor deny that—"

"For fuck's sake," Seungri grumbles, hand slapping blindly at Seunghyun's head, almost gouging him in the eyes, until his fingers pry out Seunghyun's phone and brings it up to his mouth. "I'll bring him out with his artsy fucking wheelbarrow if I have to, alright? Just shut up, I'm trying to sleep."

"Yah, who do you think you're talking to with that—" Seungri swipes for the  _End Call_  option, and Jiyong's croaking comes to a merciful halt.

"He'll bitch you out for that later," Seunghyun cautions, but the corners of his lips are already twitching upwards, pressing themselves against Seungri's neck, laving a kittenish tongue along the area of his pulse.

"I don't care," Seungri plucks, snuggling in deeper into Seunghyun's hold, cocking his head further towards the pillow to give Seunghyun's mouth more space to explore. "I've let him interrupt us for years. No more."

And that—Seunghyun doesn't ever need much validation to do whatever he wants, but waiting for Seungri's worth all those years of staving just to hear him say that.  _I don't want Jiyong anymore. I'm yours._ "Seungri."

"What?" Seungri says, still vexed from sleepiness but less inflammatory than he'd been with Jiyong. "I was just joking about the wheelbarrow. Kind of."

Seunghyun chuckles. Seungri's already pushed him to great distances, far and away, so what's a few metres more if he'll be the one to move him? "The voicemails. I want to hear them."

Seungri cracks his left eye open. "Why?"

"Why not?" Seunghyun tests, wiggling his body rambunctiously against Seungri to his lukewarm protest. "My voice, my property. I can do with it as I please."

Seungri's eye narrows, stares at him sidelong. "Is this another one of your media fetishes? Hearing yourself speak on record?"

"Takes a pervert to know a pervert," Seunghyun smarts, and Seungri harumphs grumpily. "Come on. What's your password?"

Seungri continues to look reluctant as Seunghyun crosses over his body to reach for his phone, but he's saying, "3615," by the time Seunghyun's settled back down beside him.

"What's that stand for?" Seunghyun asks, tapping the code onto the screen, unlocking it with his second try. "Your bank's branch number? Lee-sajang's net worth in billions?"

"Just listen to them already," Seungri laughs, rolling out from under Seunghyun to swing his legs off the edge of the bed, pads his feet towards Seunghyun's bathroom, and if Seunghyun wasn't preoccupied with ogling his ass like a lech, he'd have paid more mind to the curious tint of pink sprouting across Seungri's face.

There's a slew of new messages when Seunghyun inputs the key into Seungri's voicemail, which Seunghyun skips over, partly out of gallantry and mostly out of lack of patience, and a few old ones that are unremarkable and business-centric enough to lose Seunghyun's interest in listening past the two second formalities. He finds that he doesn't even have to go that far back—Seungri's pithy and rigorous when it comes to clearing his mailbox, apparently, and Seunghyun's shock about it is more out of the fact that he's not that shocked at all—and within a minute, he's already hearing what's unmistakably his own deep, intoxicated voice.

_Seungri! You fucking idiot! You're drunk, aren't you? You're really driving drunk? Are you trying to prove something? You wanna show everyone just how reckless you really can be? After what happened to Daesung, you're really just—_

Seunghyun hits on next with a cringe, not interested in hearing any of that, either. It's a low blow, to use Daesung as some measuring stick example for a scolding when Seunghyun knows how the circumstances weren't the same, how unfair it is to the both of them regardless. Belatedly, Seunghyun realizes how bad a mix grief and alcohol really could be.

The following voice message is less angry, more hysteric:  _Seungri-yah...don't you fucking die, alright? You better be okay tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and the day...just be okay, okay? Hyung wouldn't know what to do without you...my favourite maknae...my favourite person..._

It trails off there, but the melancholy is just as present in the next recording:  _Hyung's so sorry...so sorry that he's selfish...so sorry that he's a coward...so sorry that Jiyong...hyung is sorry..._

He hesitates on continuing—this wasn't a confession, this was a fucking  _eulogy_ —but he thinks on it for too long, the system automatically moving on to the fourth message without his prompting:  _You know...you have to know, right? You're smart...smarter than all of us combined...don't tell anyone I said this about you if you come out alive...when you come back alive...you better be fucking alive...I'm still alive, I'm still alive...you'd be the type to sing that at our next concert after almost fucking dying...because you're also an idiot...how can you not know? How can you keep coming back to me and not fucking know?_

 _I love you._ Seunghyun takes a breath. He knows he was drunk, the large dent in his memory a true testament to how drunk he'd been, but there's a sudden lucidity to what he's hearing, as if he'd been stone cold sober for that moment alone.  _And because you're an idiot who doesn't learn your lesson you're going to think I mean it like how Jiyong means it...but I don't. I love you. I_ love _you. I love_  you _._ _I'm fucking in love with you. All these years you've been in love with Jiyong, I've been in love with you...guess I don't learn my lesson, either..._

 _But hyung can't let you go. I'm sorry..._ Seungri comes out of the bathroom in the middle of Seunghyun's torrent of drunken apologies, freshly showered and towel hung low on his hips.  _Even if you're Jiyong's...I'll hold on to whatever's still left of you...I'll take you in any way you'd want to give...and if you won't, then I'll give enough for the both of us...I'll love you enough for all_ three _of us, for anyone else who won't._

Seungri stops at the foot of Seunghyun's bed, eyes fixed on Seunghyun as the message plays out to the end with a  _beep_ , asks him, "When did you start?"

The phone dictates a bunch of directions for Seunghyun to follow on what to do next with the messages, and it takes all of the remaining goodwill he has from last night to not press 2 for delete. "I don't know. Long ago. One day I wasn't, and then the next I just was."

Seungri hums, apparently satisfied with his answer. He walks around the bed corner, sits down on the side where Seunghyun's laying, takes his phone from Seunghyun's hand and sets it back down on the adjacent drawer, as good as deleted. "Why didn't you ever say anything?"

"What's the use?" Seunghyun returns, shifting away instinctively, but Seungri just climbs back up on the bed and straddles him between his knees. Seunghyun's hand stutters mid-air before he lands it surely on Seungri's waist, still getting used to the mentality that he's allowed to do this now, to hold Seungri to him and not be afraid of breaking something borrowed. "You weren't going to choose me over Jiyong."

"I didn't have the option," Seungri intones coarsely, but his fingers move smoothly when he twines them with Seunghyun's over his waist. "If I'd known earlier—"

"Don't," Seunghyun interrupts, knuckling down on his grip, doesn't want to speculate over lost time when he's finally been given a new lease. "It wouldn't have changed anything. You would've just been forced to say it back even if you didn't mean it."

"As if you could control me back then," Seungri says, eyes completing a full rotation, and Seunghyun muses that he can't even control Seungri now, makes Seunghyun's desire for it even more palpable, sometimes. "I wouldn't have lied to you about something like that."

"Maybe you wouldn't have," Seunghyun levels, sits up straighter to seat Seungri properly on his lap, and the brush of skin beneath Seungri's towel is a mesmerizing distraction. "But then the truth still would've been that you loved Jiyong."

"Loved?" Seungri says, emphasizing on the past tense, and also on the grind of his hips against Seunghyun's groin. "So what makes you so sure that I don't still love him? What did I do right that made you believe me now rather than if I'd said it before?"

It's not all of it, but the swell of his cock against Seunghyun's upper thigh, hot and insistent and on its way to fully erect, certainly helps. "I'm not sure. I'll probably never be sure, but that's the challenge in it, right?" Seunghyun writhes his hips upwards, in a rare show of the flexibility he doesn't have, and Seungri's resultant moan, the fanning of his eyelashes across his cheeks, is exactly why Seunghyun's more than willing to try. "Who's the one giving up so easily now, huh?"

"You're so—" Seungri twits, garbled in between another moan as he pushes at Seunghyun's chest, clambers out of his lap and his bed, retraces his steps back towards the bathroom in swift, agitated strides. "Whatever, I'm taking a shower."

"Didn't you just take one?" Seunghyun calls out delightedly, the feel of his grin a little too pigheaded, "You're paying for this month's water bill."

"Are you joining me or not?" Seungri asks, head levitating past the jamb of his bathroom door, eyebrows raised cantankerously.

Seunghyun's phone vibrates.  _New message: Kwon Jiyong_. "Coming," Seunghyun says, handles the device with zeal just so he can get to wasting water with Seungri faster.

Seungri tuts, "That phone obsession of yours, seriously," before disappearing behind the door entirely, leaving Seunghyun to deal with Jiyong's interrogation.

 _honestly, whats going on?_ is Jiyong's first question, when Seunghyun clicks on their conversation panel, the second being,  _you ok?_

Seunghyun's more than okay; for the first time in a long, long while, he's actually  _happy_. 

 _im fine._ _figuring things out for myself_ , he sends in response, and then adds,  _you were right._

 _dumbass. arent i always?_  Jiyong answers cockily, as expected, but not incorrectly.  _just make sure you 2 are decent and not fucking when we kick your door in later. youngbaes already been scarred enough_

 _ill be clothed and intact_ , Seunghyun replies,  _no promises on the maknae's state though._

 _just for that, im also gonna vomit on your chairs_ , Jiyong ripostes, status changed to offline, but he sends Seunghyun one final message before going true ghost,  _im happy for you 2. sorry for fucking things up for so long_

"Hyung!" Seungri's voice travels through the walls, bright and annoying and everything Seunghyun adores, now that it's real, now that it's  _his_. "The water temperature keeps on changing! Now my skin's melting!"

Seunghyun considers all of their sins absolved.  _give me that dinner_ _, and maybe ill forgive you._

" _Hyung!_ "

Jiyong always gets what he wants, but now Seunghyun knows that he can, too.

 

 

 

 

Not much changes at dinner: Jiyong still bitches, Youngbae still piggybacks on it, Daesung still laughs affably, and Seunghyun still gets drunk on ninety year old wine to drown out the impending reality of his departure, the distinct faces of all the people he'll miss.

The difference is that when Seunghyun starts to feel like crying, he palms around for Seungri's hand underneath the table and finds that he's finally able to reach. 

"You good?" Seungri asks him during the interim while Daesung wanders off to pee, Jiyong texts his girlfriend, and Youngbae outwardly shames Jiyong for not listening to him complain about who knows what. It's hushed enough behind all the noise pollution in the room for it to be undetected, but Seunghyun's hunter's instincts prevail to capture anything from Seungri that he can put to safekeeping.

Seunghyun nods jerkily, rasps out an, "I'm good," means it.

Seungri squeezes his hand once before he slides his fingers down to trace something along the inside of Seunghyun's palm, takes him a couple of tries for Seunghyun to piece out the inelaborate Hangeul,  _I love you_.

"Punk," Seunghyun mumbles lowly, but Seungri draws a heart around his pulse before he squeezes again, Seunghyun feeling the pressure all the way up to his chest. "Can't you just say it to me out loud?"

"Wouldn't that just ruin the challenge?" Seungri grins devilishly, releasing Seunghyun's hold, and when Jiyong snaps his fingers to bid Seungri ado, Seunghyun doesn't even mind that he goes because of his parting interjection, "Don't give up, hyung!"

And Seunghyun won't; not after he's already waited this long, not on Seungri. He touches the wrist Seungri had doodled on, thinks that four more years might feel just as long, but Seunghyun will be fine; he has Seungri's word, along with his heart, and that's all he'll ever really need to get by.

 

 

 

 


End file.
